Inside A.C.T.

posted by Emily Kitchens, cast member of Clybourne Park  Every performance of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park has been met with laughter of all kinds, from boisterous to embarrassed. As production dramaturg Beatrice Basso recently described , the play’s humor can be uncomfortable and charged. Norris’s writing strips away the veneer of political correctness; we laugh at things that we know shouldn’t be funny, and then we question ourselves for doing so. This is perhaps nowhere as overt as with the character of Betsy in the play’s first act. Betsy is deaf, and the playwright makes jokes at her expense. And every night, by Norris’s design, the audience laughs along. Betsy is played in our production by Emily Kitchens, who graduated from the A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program last year. We asked Emily about the challenges of presenting this character; she tells us below about the serious inspiration for her comic role. —The A.C.T. Intern Blog Quadrumvirate It always feels so per...

In Act I of Clybourne Park , the time is 1959 and the place is a charming Chicago bungalow on moving day. In Act II, the time is 2009 and the place is that same bungalow, but you’d hardly know it—the furniture is gone, the windows have been knocked out, and there’s graffiti on the walls. Fifty years of American life and history have passed in the interim. In the theater, though, it’s been 20 minutes. During the intermission of each performance of Clybourne Park , while theatergoers stretch their legs, use the bathroom, and/or buy drinks, monumental changes take place behind the lowered curtain on the A.C.T. stage. Furniture is removed, rugs rolled up, wallpaper stripped, and wood paneling moved in, all to create the illusion of long-term degradation. The illusion is crucial, and the payoff when the curtain is raised on the second act, priceless. But the transformation itself is fascinating, and something of a show in its own right, so we’ve decided to give you a (literally) behind-th...

Issue-rich plays like Clybourne Park —which deals with such fraught subjects as gentrification, race, and the flimsiness of liberal sentiment—tend to throw the dramaturgy and publications departments at A.C.T. into a gleeful frenzy of research, fact-finding, and heated debate. For the past two months our offices have been littered with maps of Chicago (where Clybourne Park is set), statistics about the racial makeup of the Bay Area, photos of old Chicago bungalows and high-rise housing projects, and YouTube videos showcasing the race-based humor of Dave Chappelle, Dick Gregory, and Richard Pryor (the play is a comedy, after all). To bring some of that research and debate to our audience, A.C.T. has arranged a new discussion series, Experts Talk Back , during the Clybourne Park run. Five experts in various aspects of urban development will participate in postperformance in-theater conversations about some of the provocative issues raised by the play. This week, A.C.T. Publications...

posted by Beatrice Basso, Dramaturg  Rehearsal for Bruce Norris’s incendiary comedy Clybourne Park is in full swing at A.C.T., and nervous laughter is already reverberating in the halls. The play, a send-up of white middle-class liberal mores, relies heavily on humor to explore such loaded issues as gentrification, class, and “racial sensitivity,” but, as production dramaturg Beatrice Basso illuminates below, the humor is anything but comforting. As Ben Brantley wrote in his review of last winter’s New York production of Clybourne Park , Norris “sprinkl[es] the theatrical equivalent of itching powder on his characters and on us.” Audiences in New York, Washington, D.C., and London have loved the itch, though, and so does Basso. —The A.C.T. Intern Blog Quadrumvirate “Let’s have ‘We are the World’ as the initial song in the play,” jokes Clybourne Park director Jonathan Moscone. In a play that’s all about the persistent conflicts and embarrassments of race relations, a play t...