Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the Tony Award for Best Play

Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.

Bruce Norris is the author of several plays, including The Infidel, Purple Heart, The Unmentionables, and We All Went Down to Amsterdam, which have all been staged at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. Northwestern University Press published The Infidel and Purple Heart simultaneously in 2005. Norris is a Brooklyn resident.