On two separate afternoons, 50 years apart, a modest bungalow on Chicago’s northwest side becomes a contested site in the politics of race. September 1959: Russ and Bev are moving out to the suburbs. They’ve inadvertently sold the house to the neighborhood’s first black family and ignited a community showdown. September 2009: the neighborhood is ripe for gentrification and the house is again changing hands. This time to a young white couple with plans for demolition and a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
In a provocative nod to A Raisin in the Sun, Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris takes a hilarious look at what happens when home becomes a battleground.
Artistic Director Martha Lavey's welcome letter to Clybourne Park.
A conversation with Bill Savage, Distinguished Senior Lecturer, Northwestern University and Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf Artistic Director
An interview with Clybourne Park playwright Bruce Norris and Artistic Producer Rebecca Rugg
By Artistic Producer Rebecca Rugg and Associate Professor of Theatre, Northwestern University, Harvey Young, Jr.
Excerpted from Re-Imagining A Raisin in the Sun: Former New Plays, forthcoming from NU press.
Lorraine Hansberry’s classic American play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the inspiration for Bruce Norris’s new work Clybourne Park. While A Raisin in the Sun is a dramatic fiction, it is based on Hansberry’s real-life experience as a child, when her family moved in to Chicago’s segregated Washington Park neighborhood.
An apology to Steppenwolf and the "entire city of Chicago" for not mentioning us during his 2012 Tony acceptance speech for Clybourne Park.