CLYBOURNE PARK to Open at DreamWrights Studio Theatre

DreamWrights Center for Community Arts presents Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park, directed by Sharee McFadden, October 16 through 18 and October 23 and 24 in the DreamWrights Studio Theatre.

The play takes place in one Chicago house, fifty years apart. In 1959, a neighbor arrives to talk a white couple out of selling their home to the neighborhood's first Black family. In 2009, a white couple buys the same house, now in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and a meeting about their plans to tear it down and rebuild goes badly. In both acts, everyone is trying to be polite and reasonable, and almost no one says what they actually mean.

Clybourne Park is a drama that is often very funny, and audiences tend to laugh at people they recognize before they realize what those people are really arguing about. When the play opened on Broadway, Variety called it "dangerous and provocative, but pulverizingly funny to boot." It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Olivier Award for Best New Play, and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play.

The play touches on mental health, housing, gentrification, race, economics, and relationships. McFadden says the cast has been exploring their own internal biases, feelings, and thoughts through the work, and that the production challenges audiences to dig deeper than is comfortable and reach a place of mutual honesty and understanding.

The cast includes Melinda Anderson (Francine/Lena), Jordan Collins (Karl/Steve), Amber Gamber (Bev/Kathy), Murphy Howard (Jim/Tom), Na'San Jamison (Albert/Kevin), Jayden Marcus Smith (Kenneth), Theresa Strange (Betsy/Lindsey), and Andrew Texter (Russ/Dan).