The new Broadway show “Clybourne Park” is about cultural stereotypes and race relations.
Wait, don’t run away!
Bruce Norris’ play is also razor-sharp and funny as hell.
When some characters unleash a barrage of offensive jokes in the second act, the Walter Kerr Theatre is shaking with gales of “I can’t believe I’m hearing this” laughter.
That scene is all the more explosive because the tension has been building for, oh, 50 years.
Norris’ Pulitzer winner starts off as a high-concept riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s classic “A Raisin in the Sun”: The first half takes place in the title’s Chicago neighborhood in 1959, where “Raisin” lets off.
In Hansberry’s play, an African-American family tries to buy a house in a white area. Here, Norris gives us the point of view of the sellers, the stoic Russ (Frank Wood) and his chatty, seemingly birdbrained wife, Bev (Christina Kirk).
As we gradually learn, they’re grieving over the loss of their soldier son, and want to move away from their memories. So Russ has zero patience for his neighbor Karl (Jeremy Shamos), who tries to stop the sale because the buyers are “colored.”
Dragged into the fight are the couple’s black maid (Crystal A. Dickinson) and her husband (Damon Gupton) — they’re like a reverse version of Bev and Russ: She’s quietly boiling while he’s outgoing.
In the second half, we’ve zoomed ahead to 2009.
After being proudly black for half a century, Clybourne Park has fallen on hard times. The house is now a graffiti-covered wreck, but a couple of bargain-hunting yuppies (Shamos and Annie Parisse, who also played his deaf wife in Act 1) see a golden opportunity. Their gentrifying plans include a koi pond.
This time, the ones defending their neighborhood’s character are Lena (Dickinson) and Kevin (Gupton), a couple from the local homeowners association.
Under Pam McKinnon’s sharp direction, the ensemble, which created the show at Playwrights Horizons two years ago, vividly renders different yet oddly similar characters over a 50-year gap.
Shamos particularly shines as men who act surprised by the reactions — ranging from squirming to outraged — they provoke.
Norris has an especially keen ear for PC talk on both sides of the racial divide, and how everybody’s just out to protect their turf.
In 1959, Karl advises Russ against “disregarding the needs of the people who live in a community.” In 2009, it’s Lena who warns the newcomers and their architect (Kirk) that “there’s just a lot of pride, and a lot of memories in these houses.”
Without making a big deal of it — this isn’t a show that rams a message down your throat — Norris suggests that no one, whether neighbors, family or friends, actually listens to each other.
Karl’s wife may be hearing-impaired, but in “Clybourne Park,” many are hilariously, sadly, tone-deaf.