As I note farther down, IMHO, there are few people on the planet who write as well as Frank Rich when it comes to melding pop culture with our politics. Paraphrasing what someone once commented in one of my earlier diaries on Rich’s prose, ”That’s because politics is kabuki, and nobody writes about theater better than Rich.”
So, in his latest must-read, when he takes on one of the more provocative plays of our time, Bruce Norris’ (who’s white) Clybourne Park, over at New York Magazine, “Post-Racial Farce,” just posted there over the past 24 hours, it’s sure to be thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with everything the guy says.
Words of warning from Rich if you haven’t seen (or heard about) this Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony-nominated show [it “…has been a cultural fixture during much of the Obama presidency. Following its Off Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons in early 2010, it has been produced in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Los Angeles; London (where it won the Tony equivalent, the Olivier); and Obama’s own town of Chicago…”], and you’re thinking about checking it out (I am): this is not a morally uplifting tale.
Rich tells us that the “…play is set, in two very different American eras 50 years apart—1959 (Act I) and 2009 (Act II). Or nominally different, anyway. Clybourne Park says that when it comes to race in America, not that much has changed over the past half-century, the historic arrival of an African-American family in the White House notwithstanding.”
He reminds us that the play’s author “…violates…fundamental maxim[s] of mainstream narratives of American racial history written by whites as well—that they should be uplifting parables with a clear-cut message and, at the end, a glimmer of racial justice yet to come, God be willing. Clybourne Park could not be further removed in sensibility from, say, To Kill a Mockingbird …He reminds us that America has a long way to go before it gets anywhere near its promised nirvana of racial reconciliation, if it ever does. He tells us that unreconstructed white racists, of whom there are still a significant number in America, are not the whole problem. His lunatic humor may not be built for the ages, but it surely encapsulates the lunatic racial atmosphere of the Obama years to date…”
More from Rich…
Post-Racial Farce
Since America elected its first black president, the conversation on race has turned just as loopy as the hilarious and audacious Clybourne Park.
By Frank Rich
New York Magazine
May 20, 2012
…That Norris takes a bleak—albeit frequently hilarious--view of our racial state of affairs is not hard to fathom. For all the national chatter about a “post-racial America” following the 2008 election, America seems more obsessed with race than ever, if less honest about it, since Obama strode onto the national stage. If the official milestones of his administration thus far include the passage of the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the endorsement of gay marriage, they have often been upstaged by the red-letter incidents of racial conflict that have steadily rolled out on a parallel track. Just a short list would include: the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Cambridge; the hysterical tea-party rally against health-care reform that showered obscenities on black congressmen entering the Capitol; the ousting of the African-American Department of Agriculture worker Shirley Sherrod after she was libeled as a racist; the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia; the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida; and, this month, the protest of more than 40 percent of West Virginia Democratic-primary voters, who pulled the lever for an obscure white federal-¬prison inmate rather than endorse a second run for the incumbent president of their own party. Last week brought the pièce de résistance: the Times revelation of a proposed super-PAC TV commercial that would slime Obama as pretending to be a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” With material this good, it’s hard for a playwright to keep up. But, Norris comes close…
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…There has been change on the American playing field of race since Inauguration Day 2009—not so much for the better or the worse, but a shift into a kind of twilight zone where the nation’s racial conversation has moved from its usual gears of intractability, obfuscation, angry debate, and platitudinous sentimentality to the truly unhinged. It’s as if everyone can now say, well, that’s that, we’ve elected our first African-American president, we can pat ourselves on the back for doing so, and, with that noble and historic accomplishment in the bank, we will sign on to sideshows ranging from a Herman Cain stunt presidential run to a malicious jihad mounted by a right-wing hit man in Los Angeles, Andrew Breitbart, to destroy Sherrod, an obscure federal worker in Georgia. You’d think Obama’s victory gave the entire country permission to act out like the racial brawlers of Clybourne Park.
It has certainly encouraged the GOP to unleash its id and wax with unapologetic nostalgia about the good ole days of the Jim Crow South. Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia issued a proclamation declaring Confederate History Month with no mention of slavery. Rand Paul, when running successfully for senator of Kentucky, disparaged the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Haley Barbour, the former GOP chairman and Mississippi governor and almost presidential candidate, reminisced about how things were not “that bad” back when the segregationist White Citizens’ Councils were in charge of Yazoo City during his halcyon youth. Toss in such other uninhibited party leaders as Newt Gingrich, branding Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history,” and Karl Rove, who labeled the public-spirited rapper Common “a thug” when Obama invited him to a poetry evening at the White House, and you see why some white voters in Steubenville, Ohio, were happy to confide to a Times reporter this month that they wouldn’t be casting ballots for a black man…
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…The 2012 contest may be a more revealing indicator of the racial state of the union. Obama is running against the whitest man America could produce--a product of white states, white neighborhoods, and white institutions that include a church that didn’t give African-Americans full equal rights until 1978, well after the Old Confederacy had been forced to surrender to the new order of federal civil-rights laws….
Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.
Rich is always an interesting read, IMHO. Personally, whether or not you agree him on any given topic, I think his sentence, paragraph and story structure is some of the best political writing out there in the MSM today. And, when it comes to writing about the melding of pop culture and politics in our country, there are few, if any, who’ve surpassed this guy’s work…ever (IMHO).
For some background, including info on the actors and their characterizations and how to obtain tickets, here’s an excerpt from NY Magazine’s profile of Clybourne Park…
Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s dyspeptic mini-epic of race, rage, and real estate, begins in a house in 1959 Chicago and concludes in that same house in 2009, at the dawn of the uneasy Obama Age. No cosmic Thornton Wilder dramaturgy required: This is just an old-fashioned two-act wormhole with White Flight at one end and gentrification, its blithe hipster twin, at the other. What’s changed in between? Not as much as you’d hope, posits Norris, who underlines his argument by deploying the same set of (fearless, fantastic) actors to play perversely analogous parts in both timelines.
Writing with quick, balled fists, debriding wit and feisty gloom (q.v. The Pain and the Itch, his earlier, bitterer experiment in white-liberal vivisection), Norris is unafraid of sacrilege: He grafts Clybourne — all withering contempt, heartsick disappointment, and lip-smacking cynicism — off that great sequoia of uplift A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s mid-century landmark in racial rapprochement for then mostly white Broadway. Fifty years later, still mostly white Broadway is treated to the story of the whites who sold their house to Raisin’s upwardly mobile black family and the ultimate fate of the neighborhood they left behind, and let’s just say uplift is not the primary force at work. Upthrusts, maybe — jagged social tectonics accompanied by immediate cave-ins: These better describe Norris Country, which is similar to the karst ground God of Carnage trod more clumsily and clownishly a couple of seasons ago. Abandon all pieties, ye preening progressives (white or black) who enter here. Clybourne, which took the Pulitzer in 2011, is an excellent play that doesn’t quite rise to greatness. Ultimately, when all the riotous bloodletting is done, Norris substitutes a haunted, cursed-be-Cain melancholy for true moral conclusiveness. But the show is brutally effective comic pessimism, a near-perfect blend of two great American literary pastimes: the comedy of bad manners and the gloves-off, say-anything racial cage match.
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Needless to say, nothing stays buried. Norris isn’t above certain groaning tropes of armchair-racist indelicacy: breezy sociobiological conjectures about who skis and who doesn’t, the classic “half my friends are black” rallying cry of the cornered white liberal…
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…Clybourne Park has absolutely secured its place as a fantastic abattoir of middle-class self-regard, a mass joke-letting that’s smart enough to deny us catharsis. Norris ends by conjuring images over which he exerts imperfect control: a wraith from the past, a flashback that overstays its welcome by a few overwritten lines. (Some buried boxes are more powerful unopened, unexplicated.) Clybourne Park may not be a perfect and inviolate marble monument, but on the infinite road to utopia, a solid mile-marker might even be more important. — Scott Brown