I really enjoyed this production and especially Nicole Ari Parker’s choices for Blanche. Her Blanche is very strong and sexual and funny. Blair Underwood was also very good and provoked a strong reaction from the loud female audience when he took his shirt off.  After the play the woman behind me commented that she didn’t know anything about the play going in, she came “for the juicy man meat.”  So, come for a very good production of a classic play, stay for the man meat.  

This was another great production at Barrow Street from director David Cromer, who directed last year’s Our Town.  The play, about a bickering, intellectual hearing family and their deaf son’s new relationship with a hearing woman who is going deaf, is able to be smart about so many interesting ideas while always feeling active and compelling.  The design team was also great, especially the sound design and projections which makes you more conscious of what you can hear and what some people can’t.

This play had lots of really funny moments with all of the humor coming from honest acting and writing.  Mary Louise Wilson was particularly great.  

This was a terrifically written, directed and acted play.  The “set” is an empty round space with arena like bleacher seating surrounding it.  There are no props and no one ever mimes one.  The actors never change costume.  Each scene is separated by a tone with no light changes till the blackout at the end.  Because of all of these things the play moved very fast and allowed you to imagine everything as you focused on the actors and the playwright’s words.  In a very real feeling “sex” scene two actors stand looking at each other, their words letting you know what’s going on. The closest they ever got was pressing their foreheads together.  

“I don’t think it’s possible for me to write a character if I don’t think I could act it,” he explains. “I think writing is a private improvisation. I’ve never had the courage to be an improvisational actor, so I do it in secret, and let other people do it.”

I cringed through most of this play and loved it. For people familiar with A Raisin in the Sun, Clybourne Park is the all-white neighborhood that the Youngers family set to move into.  Norris wrote a play that exits within that world, with the first act set in 1959 focusing on the white couple that is leaving the house that the Youngers are set to inhabit.  The 2nd act is set in the same house, 50 years later, in 2009.  It is very funny and uncomfortable as two generations of Americans dance around the subject of race.  It was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  

Saw this at the St. Louis Repertory Theater. Mamet dedicated this play to African-American conservative Shelby Steele who’s writing on race in America he admired. It seems that much of this play is aimed at getting out Steele’s conservative racial views (such as African Americans buying into being victims) but the more interesting aspects are about the inner workings of our judicial system.  

Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach were both good as the parents.  I’d heard that this play had been really great off-Broadway in a smaller theater and that it had lost something moving to a big Broadway theater.  It was a play the NY Times loved and I thought was okay about a clinically depressed liberal writer daughter confronting her wealthy conservative parents about something painful in the family’s past.  

This is a play I’m very comfortable recommending to people who don’t see a lot of plays.  It’s currently at the tiny Ensemble Studio theater and has amazingly reasonable $20 tickets.  I don’t think I’d classify it as a comedy but it’s a very funny play that get’s it’s humor out of honest character behavior instead of jokes. The play is worth seeing just for virtuoso last scene between Jason and his puppet Tyrone, both played by Steven Boyer.