Sara Krulwich/The New York Times From left, Frank Wood, Jeremy Shamos, Annie Parisse and Christina Kirk in “Clybourne Park,” at Playwrights Horizons.
New Yorkers will be happy to learn that they can still catch a performance of Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for drama, in a much-lauded production in a big, up-scale theater. The only problem is that they’ll have to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“Clybourne Park,” an acid-washed diptych of a play about American race relations, is playing not on Broadway, but in London’s West End, at the venerable Wyndham’s Theater, to be exact (where it runs through May 7). Earlier this year, Mr. Norris’s stinging satire picked up the Olivier Award for Best Play. That’s the British equivalent of the Tony, a prize that “Clybourne Park” never had a shot at, since it never made it to Broadway. It opened and closed Off Broadway last year, after a limited run at Playwrights Horizons.
What gives? This isn’t a case of London critics championing a work that was neglected or misunderstood by their American brethren. “Clybourne Park” received terrific reviews in New York and made a clutch of 2010 “ten best” lists (including mine) in December. Of course, by that time it had been un-seeable in New York for eight months or so, a thorned rose that had bloomed in February and died in March.
Playwrights Horizons (which has been on a roll of late) extended its production as much as its seasonal schedule permitted. And theaters in Washington and San Francisco have since staged Mr. Norris’s play. But for “Clybourne Park” to have had a continued life in New York, it would need to have been mounted in a commercial production, which now almost always means transferring to Broadway. And fine writing and astute social observation aren’t enough – not nearly enough — to take a play to Broadway these days.
London theater pundits are forever bewailing the dominance of big, crowd-courting (and often American-born) musicals in the West End of the 21st century – shows like “Wicked,” “Jersey Boys” and “Legally Blonde.” But a barbed, eccentric and un-pedigreed provocateur of a play like “Clybourne Park” (which was first staged in London at the Royal Court Theater in December) is still more likely to show up on the West End than on Broadway.
The vagaries of timing may account in part for the short New York life of “Clybourne Park.” The season it opened Off Broadway, there was already a satire about race on Broadway. It was called (baldly enough) “Race.” Never mind that it wasn’t nearly as original, witty or thoroughly imagined as Mr. Norris’s comedy. “Race” was written by David Mamet, one of the few living American playwrights who is if not a household name, then certainly one known in the book-lined dens of literate households. And the cast of “Race” included James Spader, the Emmy-winning star of “Boston Legal,” and Richard Thomas, whom older theatergoers might remember from television as their beloved John Boy Walton.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Brendan Griffin and Christina Kirk in “Clybourne Park.”
In other words, “Clybourne Park” might have gone to Broadway if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had agreed to appear in it. (I use “appear” instead of “star” because “Clybourne Park,” which emphasizes context and content over character, has no real starring roles.) Or possibly, just possibly, it might have transferred if Mr. Norris had agreed to rewrite it to include the kind of oversized emotions and domestic showdowns that made “August Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s high-brow soap opera, a Broadway crowd pleaser a few years earlier. But in its small, sly and star-free form, “Clybourne Park” didn’t stand a chance of mainstream glory.
London’s hearty embrace of “Clybourne” may have been partly inspired by Mr. Norris’s merciless portrait of so-smug-they’re-ugly Americans. When the play opened at Wyndham’s, Charles Spencer wrote in the Telegraph, “The play is outrageously funny as it tramples over politically correct pieties, revealing that racism is still a live issue in the States, though most middle-class whites prefer to forget the fact.”
Such exultation was not uncommon in the British reviews. Despite (or perhaps because of) the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States, the West End has in recent years reveled in theatrical take-downs of Britain’s bigger, younger and clumsier cousin from across the pond. Lucy Prebble’s “Enron,” another West End transfer from the Royal Court, was a flashy, cartoonish post-mortem of an all-American financial disaster, and it became the hottest ticket in town. (It belly-flopped on Broadway, suggesting, among other things, that American theatergoers prefer more flattering mirrors.)
Still, I don’t think that it’s just anti-American sentiment that allowed “Clybourne Park” to have at least a shot at mainstream success in London. (I should point out that the West End run of “Clybourne Park” will have been a fairly short one, just a little over two months.) In a recent essay in the Guardian that raised hackles in the New York theater, the American playwright Christopher Shinn, whose works have premiered at the Royal Court, compared the experiences of working on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I wonder if Londoners simply like the theater more than New Yorkers,” wrote Mr. Shinn, on the occasion of the premiere of his new play “Picked,” which opened this week at the Vineyard Theater in New York. Referring to the relative degrees of resistance he encountered in staging his plays here and there, he proposed that perhaps “American actors and directors know that their theatergoers are impatient,” adding, “whereas in London, the greater ease at being part of a group means the actors and director assume a generous audience, not an always-potentially-dissatisfied one.”
I would agree that, as a whole, patience is perceived as less of a virtue in the States than in most European countries. We tend to want our entertainments to make their points fast and to keep their energy levels high. Even for New Yorkers, going to the theater is rarely the habitual pastime that it is for many Londoners. So when we go – and spend big bucks to do so – we expect instant and preferably loud impact to confirm we haven’t wasted our time or money.
Laced with epithets and stoked by its characters’ simmering anger, “Clybourne Park” is neither stodgy nor quiet. But it is, by the standards of mainstream American theater, indirect and subversively, discomfitingly thought-provoking.
How do you feel about this tale of two cities? Is there – and should there be – a place on Broadway for plays like “Clybourne Park”? Is the West End truly more receptive to thoughtful theater? Or are we simply talking about different, nationalistically driven tastes?
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