What Is the Story of Clybourne Park?
At the heart of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a house. In act one, the house is being sold in 1959. Following a family tragedy, a white couple is selling their home in a suburban Chicago neighborhood, and their neighbors was dismayed to learn that the buyers are African-American. In act two the same house is again being sold. But now, in 2009, a white couple is purchasing the home from an African-American couple, and they butt heads over showing respect for a neighborhood that has become largely African-American. These two racially charged transactions tell the story of a home and a neighborhood, as well as the sense of history and entitlement people hang on to, even in the ever-shifting physical boundaries of the American cultural landscape.