Oh Broadway, remember when you didn’t target tourists with such nonsense? Like the classic play A Raisin in the Sun. If you recall, there’s a scene in which the black family puts a down payment on a house in Chicago’s Clybourne Park neighborhood, and gets a visit from a sniveling character named Karl Lindner, representing the white folks in the area and making a generous offer to buy them out.
Playwright Bruce Norris borrowed Karl (that’s Karl, sitting above) and put him in his play Clybourne Park, and Bruce wound up winning a Pulitzer Prize. Then three weeks ago, he won the Tony for best play.
He wrote it in two acts, the first taking placing in 1959, as Karl shows up at the house in Clybourne to confront the white couple selling it, then shifts 50 years ahead to the same house, with the same actors from act I now playing new roles as modern-day, miserable, trendy assholes, and we see that racism has come full circle and then taken another lap or two out of political correctness.
The play is awesome. And sitting by me in the audience and loving it as much as me was Eric Stonestreet from “Modern Family.” Trust both of us and see it.
