This past semester, in my Introduction to Acting class, we were assigned the play "Clybourne Park" by Bruce Norris. It is a relatively new, two-act play that was inspired by the dramatic classic A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry. Norris’s play begins in 1959 when Bev and Russ are preparing to move out of their home in Clybourne Park, an all-White neighborhood. A man from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Karl Lindner, comes to visit them and informs them that their house has been sold to a Black family.
Although this news initially shocks Bev and Russ, they refuse to take back the house, despite Karl’s insistent requests that they do. They are a couple with truly good intentions and treat Francine, their Black maid, and her husband with great kindness. Karl begs them to consider what is best for the community, but Russ states that the community never helped them and being all White has not made it perfect. It is revealed that Russ and Bev’s son, Kenneth, killed himself after coming back from the Korean War and being viewed as a killer of the innocent in Clybourne Park.
Act II takes place fifty years later and a similar situation is unfolding once again in Clybourne Park, but the roles have switched. Clybourne Park is now an all-Black community and a White family is moving in with the intent to completely remodel the house. The Black couple that is selling the house, played by the actors who played Francine and her husband in Act I, does not want a White family to come in and remodel the house, changing the look of the historic neighborhood.
Lena and Kevin, the Black couple, associate the identity of the community with its rich history and the race of its occupants. Lena especially believes that if a White family comes in and updates the house, then they will be erasing the history behind the house and what her family and race had to go through to be able to live in Clybourne Park.
The identity of the community of Clybourne Park is deeply rooted in race. When it is an all-White community, it is viewed as the picture of suburban perfection. Respectable families who live beyond their means with servants and random items, like a chafing dish, that they don’t use everyday occupy the houses in the neighborhood. However, beyond this facade of perfection lies flaws. Clybourne Park and its members believe the town to be perfect, but this perfect town drove a young man to commit suicide.
When Clybourne Park is an all-Black community, its identity is associated with working families who utilize their perseverance to overcome race obstacles and build themselves a neighborhood that may be shabby in some ways, but is rooted in hard work. Both of these identities is threatened when new families of different races intend to move in. Both the community of Clybourne Park and the individuals who occupy it associate their identities with race and its implications. However, race is not indicative of the traits a person will possess or the identity they occupy. In both the past and the present, race has come to be a primary indicator of identity, but it is socially constructed and the differences it creates between people are merely physical. Race as a formulator of identity is a sad indicator of where society has been and how far it has left to come.