CATCHING UP WITH CLYBOURNE
T. CHARLES ERICKSON
Yvette Freeman and Corey Allen in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom directed by Liesl Tommy (2012).
Tommy’s aesthetic is visceral and physical. “I’m interested in the violence of being a human being,” says Tommy, “and sometimes that is with actual physical violence onstage, and sometimes it’s just the thing that pulsates underneath every exchange.” In order to achieve the “muscularly-performed” productions she is known for, Tommy starts with the metaphor of the play. She rarely sculpts a play to drive a point or agenda, but strives to keep the metaphor alive “so that people can have the experience of the story. I rarely want things to be just realism. I’m not all that excited by it. You always want that feeling that there’s a larger life in the back somehow.” Her training as an actor at Brown/Trinity Rep informed how she runs her rehearsals. Tommy does not like seeing hyper-sculpted theatre where the director’s hand is clearly noticeable. She believes that the actors should drive the piece so that the audience can see people being free onstage. In the first week of rehearsals, she asks questions of her actors to gather their perspectives and impressions of the piece. She rarely wants to adhere to a big concept that has no relation to the actors on stage. First and foremost, Tommy strives to “tell the story with as much clarity and ferocity as possible.” With an emotionally engaging story such as Ruined, which follows a group of Congolese women surviving in the crossfire of civil war, Tommy didn’t give the actors any easy outs during rehearsals, instead immersing them in the details of the conflict. “It was imperative that [the actors] felt the full depth of their characters, that they understood every facet of who they were,” she explains. When working on a play, Tommy asks “What is the set in real life, and how do I take it up a few notches? How do these people interact and how do I make it more? I want to see people using language vigorously, smacking out those consonants, getting in each other’s face, and I want to feel like I’m smelling sweat.” We can expect nothing less with A Raisin in the Sun.
Nearly fifty years after the Younger family moved to Chicago’s fictional white Clybourne Park neighborhood in A Raisin in the Sun, another Chicagoan did a bit of seminal neighborhood integration himself. It was in this climate of Barack Obama becoming the first African-American President of the United States and moving into the White House that Bruce Norris premiered his 2010 play Clybourne Park, a companion of sorts to Raisin. In its first act, Clybourne Park follows the white couple that has agreed to sell their home to the Younger family. Neighborhood representative Karl Lindner — the only character to appear in both Raisin and Clybourne — tries to convince them not to sell. The second act fast-forwards fifty years to the present, as a different white family tries to buy and tear down that same house in a now black-dominated neighborhood. Norris realized that his generation represented the children of the fictional Lindner. “That’s a lesson that sticks with you, the lesson that you are, essentially the villain in someone else’s story,” he told The New York Times in August 2011. “Many years later, I thought, what if we turned the story around and told it from the opposite angle, the angle of people like my family, the villains, the ones who wanted to keep them out?” The play debuted on Broadway in April 2012 and garnered numerous awards: the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the 2011 Olivier Award for Best New Play, and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play. It makes its Boston premiere at the SpeakEasy Stage Company in March 2013 with a production directed by M. Bevin O’Gara, the Huntington’s associate producer. In concert, the two plays explore various facets and eras of racism. Other playwrights, too, are grappling with the ideas Hansberry addresses in her play: Kirsten Greenidge’s The Luck of the Irish and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place both take inspiration from Raisin, delving into further studies of race, American culture, and the search for home. Hansberry predicted that racial tension would soon boil over. As Frank Rich wrote in New York Magazine, “Explode it did, in the years after Hansberry’s final curtain, and Norris’s play is most of all an effort to sort through the ensuing wreckage.” - ALI LESKOWITZ
- VICKI SCHAIRER
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