Clybourne Park to Make New England Premiere at Trinity Rep

Trinity Rep continues its 2011-2012 season on October 14 with the New England premiere of Clybourne Park, the ingenious dramedy by Bruce Norris. The play is proving wildly popular with Trinity Rep patrons - the theater has already extended the dates of the run past the original announcement in order to accommodate demand. Based on the events surrounding Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (which recently played to much acclaim before Trinity Rep audiences in 2009), director Brian Mertes' take on this "buzz-saw sharp new comedy" (The Washington Post) will run through November 20 in the Dowling Theater.

This Broadway-bound stunner just won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and led the nation's "Top Ten of 2010" lists from Entertainment Weekly to The New York Times. Resident acting company members Timothy Crowe, Mauro Hantman, Anne Scurria, Rachael Warren, and Joe Wilson, Jr. will bring their virtuosic talents to bear in this tale spanning two eras - where each actor must take on at least two roles. When the play opens, in 1959, we find ourselves in the tidy living room of grieving parents Bev (Anne Scurria) and Russ (Timothy Crowe). Having just lost their son to the trauma of the Korean War, they are eager to leave the trappings of white middle-class Chicago in the hopes that their broken hearts will stay behind with their broken home. Somewhere offstage, the Younger family of A Raisin in the Sun is ready to move up and realize their dreams, despite racially charged-meddling from their fearful new neighbors, who are relying on squirrely neighbor Karl (Mauro Hantman) to talk Bev and Russ out of moving and taking a chunk of Clybourne Park's property values with them.

We then return to the house in 2009 to find that a circuitous path of gentrification has taken course. Fifty years later, Clybourne Park has become an all-black neighborhood, and the tables have turned. A young white couple (played by Brown/Trinity Rep MFA '12 students Tommy Dickie and acting company member Rachael Warren) attempt to purchase the home in order to renovate it, only to find an obstacle in the form of a young black couple (played by Brown/Trinity Rep MFA '12 student Mia Ellis and company member Joe Wilson, Jr.) whose initial hesitations - based on housing regulations - are peeled back to reveal deeper objections.

In an interview with Trinity Rep Artistic Director Curt Columbus, playwright Bruce Norris noted that when he first encountered A Raisin in the Sun, he couldn't truly relate to any of the characters through his own life experience - save the white realtor, Karl Lindner, who attempts to preserve the status quo. "Since I always loved the play and felt held at a remove from it by virtue of pigmentation, I thought - why not tell it from the other way around? And that's how Clybourne Park got started."

Norris chose to approach writing the play with the house as his protagonist, as some respects. Resident set designer Eugene Lee has created the modest bungalow which Clybourne Park - and our characters - call home. As the characters fluctuate in tandem with time, so does the home, transforming before our very eyes to recreate the subtle shifts in the play's fabric. The landscape is rough-hewn, facing the difficult truths of this play head on -we can see that change is taking shape in this world. "I was trying to see what has and hasn't changed. What has happened in the intervening 50 years since the end of A Raisin in the Sun is that a lot of very admirable laws have been written, and others changed, to take away political barriers that have kept people down for a long time. What has not changed, I think, in fifty or two thousand or ten thousand years, is human nature. I think people, by nature, are territorial and self-interested. Conflicts that arise over race, ethnicity, culture, don't arise in the absence of a territorial conflict," said Norris.

Tickets are now on sale at the Trinity Rep box office, 201 Wsahington St.; by phone at (401) 351-4242, and online at www.trinityrep.com.

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