South Africa: Clybourne Park - the Lighter Side of History, Race and Property

analysis

American playwright Bruce Norris' Pulitzer and Olivier-award winning play is a deceptively simple comedy in which middle-class manners and restraint slowly stew and boil in a universal sauce of land, race, history and dispossession. This superb local cast beautifully makes visible that which hides behind the playwright's eloquent writing. By MARIANNE THAMM.

If there is one criticism of Bruce Norris' bristling text it is that Act II - set in 2009 in the Chicago neighbourhood of Clybourne Park about to be "gentrified" - is saturated with an almost insufferable brand of whiteplaining. The play, written in 2011, is of course set in the United States where black Americans are a minority tasked and burdened with challenging deeply-entrenched monolithic white hegemonic dominance and ignorance (why else Trump?).

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