Clybourne Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clybourne_Park

Melanie and I saw "Clybourne Park" tonight, the 2012 Tony winning and 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning play. We loved it. Engaging and "thought-provoking" in the true sense. It gives you believable situations, real characters and dialogue, without supplying answers to the questions raised.

The show is surprisingly funny with amazing and brilliant conversations that wander off into non-sequiturs which circle back into poignantly still moments. It uses silence well, it's Miles Davis, the pauses are pregnant.

It's almost brilliant, but it's not perfect.

There are devices introduced which are never resolved. Are they MacGuffins? No. They don't detract from the main storyline to enhance it, and they have no satisfying conclusions themselves. (The trunk. The son's letter.) So why are they there?

On the surface "Clybourne Park" is about race relations, the awkward misunderstandings between races, the embarrassing attempts and failures to find common ground. Cleverly it shows how, for all our enlightened modern progress, we're still stuck.

What elevates the play is it's really about the human impasse, how all people, even couples, vibrant and dynamic, know each other and communicate but don't connect. We see lots of communicating but not so much communication. It's about the inability of people to understand each other.

Alain and Kacie saw it a couple of months ago and I asked them recently what they thought. I think their reactions were like ours, that it was good but not great. At the time I was surprised they said that, from the reviews I thought it would be astonishing

Now that I've seen it, I agree with them. The play has so much, yet it somehow misses the mark. It's ALMOST there, but falls just short. On a scale of ten, I give it a nine. I think Alain might give it an eight, Kacie about the same.

"Clybourne Park" is a fantastic play - and it's so great to have a modern Broadway play worth talking about - and I recommend seeing it. But it's just short of a classic.


(I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to comment.)