CLYBOURNE PARK - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

Spring 2012 Issue No. 57

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2012, Issue Number 57 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

On its journey from Playwrights Horizons to the Walter Kerr Theatre, a two-year, six-block journey from Forty-second to Forty-eighth Street, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park has knit together many the© H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Corbis.

Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary John B. Beinecke Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz André Bishop Debra Black Allison M. Blinken Mrs. Leonard Block James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Bernard Gersten Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz

Linda LeRoy Janklow Jane Lisman Katz Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Elihu Rose Stephanie Shuman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

CLYBOURNE

regional theaters, including the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, where Norris began his writing career twenty years ago, and London’s Royal Court Theatre, transferring from there to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End where it garnered the Olivier Award. Along the way, the play received the 2011 Pulitzer

to be able to devote an issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review to Clybourne Park now that it is coming “uptown” to Broadway and Lincoln Center Theater’s members will be able to join the general public in welcoming this scintillating, funny, and contentious play back home to New York.

The House on Clybourne Street by Beryl Satter

In this issue, actor turned Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Bruce Norris spoke to John Guare in

an interview that we reprint here from 2005, and they spoke again recently about Norris’s career writing for the theater; in his essay, Chicago aficionado Bill Savage brings that city and its neighborhoods to

Secrets of the Trade: An Interview with an Anonymous Real-Estate Broker

A New Direction: An Interview with Bruce Norris

vivid life. Historian Beryl Satter writes about the house in which Clybourne Park is set; a New York realestate agent talks (anonymously) about some of the more repugnant practices in the real-estate business that persist even here in New York City today; memoirist Paul Clemens remembers growing

Left in Detroit by Paul Clemens My Williamsburg by Joyce George

up in Detroit after white flight; and we include a scene written by a young playwright, J. Stephen

Brantley, that encapsulates the diverse mix of people living today in Jackson Heights, Queens. A gorgeous photo essay by Joyce George depicts the changing face of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. An

excerpt from Patricia and Fredrick McKissack’s biography of Lorraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun, provides the context for that beloved play and the jumping-off point for Clybourne Park.

Young, Black, and Determined by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack

Block by Block by Bill Savage

Jackson Heights 3 A.M. by J. Stephen Brantley

kitchenette building by Gwendolyn Brooks

acclaimed run in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum. Clybourne Park has now been seen at several

Prize. Only a few lucky New Yorkers got to see this fascinating play during its initial run. We’re delighted

Back cover photograph from The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, published by Steidl /www.steidlville.com.

And we close the issue with a poem by the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. —The Editors

The excerpt from A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is reproduced by permission of Vintage.

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

aters. The cast and creative team that premiered the play in New York in 2010 are returning from an

HANSBERRY’S WORDS Mama: ’Course I don’t want to make it sound fancier than it is…It’s just a plain little old house—but it’s made good and solid—and it will be ours. Walter Lee—it makes a difference in a man when he can walk on floors that belong to him… Ruth: Where is it? Mama: Well—well—it’s out there in Clybourne Park— From A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

CLYBOURNE

The House on Clybourne Street by Beryl Satter

In this issue, actor turned Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Bruce Norris spoke to John Guare in

Secrets of the Trade: An Interview with an Anonymous Real-Estate Broker

A New Direction: An Interview with Bruce Norris

Left in Detroit by Paul Clemens My Williamsburg by Joyce George

up in Detroit after white flight; and we include a scene written by a young playwright, J. Stephen

Brantley, that encapsulates the diverse mix of people living today in Jackson Heights, Queens. A gorgeous photo essay by Joyce George depicts the changing face of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. An

Young, Black, and Determined by Patricia and Fredrick McKissack

Block by Block by Bill Savage

Jackson Heights 3 A.M. by J. Stephen Brantley

kitchenette building by Gwendolyn Brooks

acclaimed run in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum. Clybourne Park has now been seen at several

Prize. Only a few lucky New Yorkers got to see this fascinating play during its initial run. We’re delighted

Back cover photograph from The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, published by Steidl /www.steidlville.com.

And we close the issue with a poem by the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. —The Editors

The excerpt from A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is reproduced by permission of Vintage.

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

aters. The cast and creative team that premiered the play in New York in 2010 are returning from an

CLYBOURNE STREET

By Beryl Satter “Knowledge is power, Bev.” “Then I choose to remain powerless.”

This exchange between Jim, the naïve white minister, and Bev, the dreamy white housewife, epitomizes the well-meaning, “we care a lot” liberalism that is so brilliantly skewered in Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. With enormous economy and pitch-perfect attention to language, Norris contrasts the self-justifications surrounding the white flight of the 1950s with those used by early-twenty-first century white gentrifiers. Although the language of race shifts from comically evasive to hilariously profane, Norris shows us the stronger, underlying continuities. We see two generations of white Americans struggle to square their self-images as decent, thoughtful people with the reality of their social and economic power over their African-American servants, would-be friends, and potential neighbors. Unexplored, however, is the transformation of one essential character in the play—the house itself, the prize around which racial skirmishes occur. In 1959, this “modest, three-bedroom bungalow” is neat and well-maintained. By 2009, it exhibits an “overall shabbiness,” with crumbling plaster and missing doorways. What happened? We know that it shifted from white to black ownership. Can this alone explain the building’s decline? The characters in Clybourne Park provide standard liberal explanations for the property’s sorry state. The white characters make vague references to drugs, violence, segregation, and public housing projects. The black characters make equally vague references to “certain economic interests that are being served” by the economic decline that precedes gentrification. The characters then switch back to what they “all know” is the real issue—personal racism, including the apparently pressing questions of whether whites have black friends and whether black people can ski. So what, exactly, did happen to that house? I’ve given years of thought to this question. I’m a historian. Like Norris, I believe that the past has a profound impact on the present. Indeed, the racial change that is at the heart of Norris’s play had a profound impact on my own life. I grew up in Chicago, the setting for Clybourne Park. My parents, both the Chicago-born children of Jewish immigrants, were white “ethnics.” They quickly learned, however, that when it came to ethical behavior around shifting racial demographics, they could not “have it both ways,” as Norris’s character Bev believes. My father, Mark J. Satter, was a left-wing attorney. He held an unfashionable belief for a 1950s Chicagoan—namely, that the crucial difference between black Americans and white Americans lay not in culture but in access to capital. For this reason, my father’s story runs on an entirely different track from that depicted in Clybourne Park. I present it to you as a useful supplement to the play. My father’s education in the harsh realities of race and real estate began in the spring of 1957, when a black couple, Albert and Sallie Bolton, came to him for legal advice. They were being evicted from a house they had purchased. Could my father slow the proceedings? The price they’d paid for that property—$13,900—seemed high, but the shocking nature of the situation was revealed only when my father checked the property’s records. He discovered that the Boltons’ real-estate agent was actually the property’s owner. Only weeks before selling the house to the Boltons for $13,900, he had bought it himself—for $4,300. © Currency collage by Mark Wagner, Money Monster, 2007. Courtesy of the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.

The Boltons’ agent never told them that he was the property’s owner. When the Boltons said that they wished to consult an attorney, he informed them that he was also an attorney and would advise them faithfully. The worst of it, however, was how he sold the Boltons their house. The Boltons bought “on contract”—that is, on an installment plan. A form of financing that is seeing a resurgence today, contract buying combines the worst of owning with the worst of renting. A contract buyer makes a down payment. He or she is also responsible for taxes, insurance, interest, and property maintenance. But contract buyers, unlike mortgage buyers, get no equity in their property until it is paid for in full. Properties sold on contract could be repossessed if the purchaser missed even one monthly payment. You could pay $8,500 on a house priced at $9,000, miss a payment, and lose the property. Contract selling left the buyer in a terribly vulnerable position—one made far worse when, as with the Boltons, the property’s price was dramatically inflated. Yet the Boltons had no choice but to accept the harsh deal. Until the late 1960s,

CLYBOURNE STREET

By Beryl Satter “Knowledge is power, Bev.” “Then I choose to remain powerless.”

banks and savings and loan institutions overwhelmingly practiced “redlining,” refusing to make mortgage loans to AfricanAmericans no matter what their individual credit history. In the mid-twentieth century, real-estate speculators purchased property “low” from whites and sold “high” to blacks. But if the blacks couldn’t get mortgages, how could they buy, and buy high at that? The answer, in Chicago and in many other cities, was to purchase on contract. Contract buying seemed to give black buyers a chance to circumvent the national, race-based credit blockage that stood between them and their aspirations for home ownership. Yet the chance that contract buying gave to African-American home buyers was stacked against them by the inflated prices they were forced to pay. For example, a 1963 study found that the average price markup on properties sold to Chicago’s African-Americans on contract was 73 percent. As my father noted in 1958, such markups drained black Chicago of $1 million a day—approximately $8 million a day in today’s money. In the late 1950s, of Chicago’s almost one million black residents, 85 percent of those who bought property purchased on contract. In all likelihood, this was how the house in Clybourne Park would have changed hands. My father wrote an article about the trap that the Boltons had fallen into. He soon attracted scores of black clients who had been similarly mistreated. He was horrified at his discovery, and did all that he could to alert the city to the danger it faced. He understood that the predatory terms of contract sales would inevitably trigger mass deterioration in “racially changing” communities. This was because black contract buyers who purchased at inflated prices could not afford to miss a single payment without losing everything. If the wife in a couple wasn’t working, she took a job. If both had jobs, they took on extra shifts. They put off building maintenance. They divided up their properties and crammed in extra tenants. In short, they engaged in heroic efforts to hold on to their properties, but that wasn’t how their white neighbors viewed the situation. They saw the effects—overcrowded properties, declining maintenance, absent parents and unsupervised children. They knew nothing of the cause. Frustrated by the obvious decline of their community, whites sold at a loss and moved to the suburbs, bitter over having been “driven out” of their community. But their African-American neighbors, many of whom had earnings and tastes every bit as middle-class as those of their white predecessors, didn’t have that option. Because they had bought on contract, they couldn’t sell. They could only abandon, and, in doing so, sacrifice every penny invested to date. Contract buying could explain the deterioration of the property that rests at the center of Clybourne Park. It would have nothing to do with the tastes and lifestyles of the new black owners and everything to do with the predatory financing they were forced to accept—a situation invisible to those not ensnared in it. Of course, dangerous real-estate financing was only one of numerous exploitative practices entrapping black homeowners, ranging from unfair property assessments and inflated insurance premiums to excessive charges for groceries and gasoline. My father never made much money from his law practice. Instead, he invested all he had in several properties located in a Jewish section of Chicago. By the mid-1950s, that community was rapidly becoming black, with the overwhelming majority of properties sold on contract at exploitative prices. My father watched in horror as the inevitable decline set in, and as the value drained from the properties upon which he’d gambled his own and his family’s future. He was boxed in. The longer he held on, the less his properties were worth. If he tried to sell, he would find no buyers except the speculators he abhorred. He chose to keep his properties and do his best to maintain them. His individual efforts were useless, though, against the tidal wave of extortion and exploitation engulfing the community. He died of heart disease in 1965, at the age of forty-nine. By that point, my mother did not have enough money to pay the coal bills on the properties. In 1966, just a few years short of paying off all the mortgages in full, she sold the four buildings, containing forty-two units between them, for $2,000. In 2004, I investigated the property records. I found that within months of their sale one of the twelve flats, for which speculators paid my mother $500, was again for sale. Its price was $13,000, on contract. This is history most people don’t know, but it is history that matters. As one of Norris’s characters tells us in a rare flash of insight, the “history of America is the history of private property.” Norris shows us what happens when we get that history wrong. Humor and misunderstandings ensue, while the rotten secret remains buried, poisoning the ground as it waits for the shovel to hit. Beryl Satter was raised in Chicago, Skokie, and Evanston, Illinois. She is the author of Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America. She is Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark, and lives in New York City.

TRADE

home ownership. Yet the chance that contract buying gave to African-American home buyers was stacked against them by the inflated prices they were forced to pay. For example, a 1963 study found that the average price markup on properties sold to Chicago’s African-Americans on contract was 73 percent. As my father noted in 1958, such markups drained black Chicago of $1 million a day—approximately $8 million a day in today’s money. In the late 1950s, of Chicago’s almost one

AN INTERVIEW WITH AN ANONYMOUS REAL-ESTATE BROKER

million black residents, 85 percent of those who bought property purchased on contract. In all likelihood, this was how the house in Clybourne Park would have changed hands. My father wrote an article about the trap that the Boltons had fallen into. He soon attracted scores of black clients who

This winter our co-executive editor, John Guare, had lunch with a New York City Realtor, whom we shall call Vicky Plantagenet, the president of Plantagenet Properties. She spoke on the condition of anonymity about some of the more unsavory aspects of the real-estate business, sixty years ago and today.

had been similarly mistreated. He was horrified at his discovery, and did all that he could to alert the city to the danger it faced. He understood that the predatory terms of contract sales would inevitably trigger mass deterioration in “racially changing” communities. This was because black contract buyers who purchased at inflated prices could not afford to miss a single payment without losing everything. If the wife in a couple wasn’t working, she took a job. If both had jobs, they took on extra shifts. They put off building maintenance. They divided up their properties and crammed in extra tenants.

What were some of the insalubrious real-estate practices in 1959?➞➪➪➞➞➞➞➞➞➞➞Okay, you want to know about sleazy real-estate practices back then? All those great terms, like redlining, which designated which neighborhoods (usually inner city) were denied services—supermarkets shutting down, banks lending money to poor whites but not to middle-class blacks. Another unsavory practice was blockbusting, which was when real-estate speculators, who also had the great name of panic peddlers, got white owners to flee their neighborhoods and sell their property to blacks. There goes the neighborhood.

In short, they engaged in heroic efforts to hold on to their properties, but that wasn’t how their white neighbors viewed the situation. They saw the effects—overcrowded properties, declining maintenance, absent parents and unsupervised children. They knew nothing of the cause. Frustrated by the obvious decline of their community, whites sold at a loss and moved to the suburbs, bitter over having been “driven out” of their community. But their African-American neighbors, many of whom had earnings and tastes every bit as middle-class as those of their white predecessors, didn’t have that option. Because they had bought on contract, they couldn’t sell. They could only abandon, and, in doing so, sacrifice every penny invested to date. Contract buying could explain the deterioration of the property that rests at the center of Clybourne Park. It would have

tribal stronghold, wary of any interlopers out to disrupt their way of life. Like the song from West Side Story says, “One of your own kind, stick to your own kind.” I, as a broker, have to know who you are to see if you’ll fit into that tribe. If you don’t fit in but persist in wanting the apartment, I’ll tell you up front, “Forget it, you’ll never pass the interview with the board. Don’t waste their time. Don’t waste mine.” The co-op board doesn’t have to give a reason why they’re turning you down. They turn you down and that’s that. It’s not discrimination. It’s not anti-Semitism. It’s not homophobia. It’s profiling. I walk down the street and profile everyone I see. I’m profiling you as we speak. I can’t help it. We all do it. And it’s against the law. But it’s necessary. Once I know your profile, I can steer you to a more congenial co-op or, better yet, show you only condos that have no boards, no shares; you plop down your money, buy raw space, and move in. Or, better yet, if you have that kind of cash, buy a town house. And I have one that just came on the market.

nothing to do with the tastes and lifestyles of the new black owners and everything to do with the predatory financing

Are any of these tactics still employed?➪➞➪The Civil Rights Act, the creation of the Fair Housing Authority, the Community Reinvestment Act—agencies and statutes like this ended those sneaky practices, so I can’t give you any present-day horror stories. Laws prevent it. That said, most real-estate brokers break the law every day.

they were forced to accept—a situation invisible to those not ensnared in it. Of course, dangerous real-estate financing was only one of numerous exploitative practices entrapping black homeowners, ranging from unfair property assessments and inflated insurance premiums to excessive charges for groceries and gasoline. My father never made much money from his law practice. Instead, he invested all he had in several properties located in a Jewish section of Chicago. By the mid-1950s, that community was rapidly becoming black, with the overwhelming majority of properties sold on contract at exploitative prices. My father watched in horror as the inevitable decline set in, and as the value drained from the properties upon which he’d gambled his own and his family’s future. He was boxed in. The longer he held on, the less his properties were worth. If he tried to sell, he would find no buyers except the speculators he abhorred. He chose to keep his properties and do his best to maintain them. His individual efforts were useless, though, against the tidal wave of extortion and exploitation engulfing the community. He died of heart disease in 1965, at the age of forty-nine. By that point, my mother did not have enough money to pay the coal bills on the properties. In 1966, just a few years short of paying off all the mortgages in full, she sold the four buildings, containing forty-two units between them, which speculators paid my mother $500, was again for sale. Its price was $13,000, on contract. This is history most people don’t know, but it is history that matters. As one of Norris’s characters tells us in a rare flash of insight, the “history of America is the history of private property.” Norris shows us what happens when we get that history wrong. Humor and misunderstandings ensue, while the rotten secret remains buried, poisoning the ground as it waits for the shovel to hit. Beryl Satter was raised in Chicago, Skokie, and Evanston, Illinois. She is the author of Each Mind a Kingdom and the chair of the Department of History at Rutgers University in Newark. She lives in New York City.

for $2,000. In 2004, I investigated the property records. I found that within months of their sale one of the twelve flats, for

How?➪Suppose a couple with a lot of new money is looking to move into a very snobby old-money East Side co-op—meaning they want to purchase shares in the ownership of that building and live there. These people are nice, but they might be gay, black, Jewish, Asian, Arab, Russian oligarchs, have lots of young children, be rock stars or hedge-fund hotshots with active social lives, or have big dogs, or else they’re looking for an investment to use for sublets. Or, the cardinal sin, they may just be downright tacky, with no degree from Yale, no membership in the Knick (the Knickerbocker Club), no second home in Southampton. “Who are you?” That’s what we’re not allowed to ask when you come into my office. Should I show you the sort of apartment you want but I know you’ll never get into because of the history of the building? Old-fashioned discrimination has a twenty-first-century name: profiling. It’s the all-important fact. It’s not legal. This is where I break the law. I have ways of finding out who you are: I thank God for Google every day. Then I make decisions based on your profile and on the profile of the building that contains the apartment of your dreams. You might have lots of cash, but then I find out the source of your money. Whoops! Slum landlord? Sorry. Because it’s who you are, not your money, that’s going to get you past the co-op board, which operates with the iron hand of a primitive

What was the big legal case Corcoran was involved in?➪➪➞➞ Oh, you want to know about the real-estate civil rights case in 2006—Corcoran versus the Attorney General of New York State. You have done your homework. I’d like to forget that messy throwback, a case of literal redlining. A broker was dumb enough to take a map of Brooklyn and outline in red Magic Marker different neighborhoods with the instruction to his agents to steer affluent whites to Brooklyn Heights and anyone else over to Fort Greene. The map got out. The state brought a civil-rights violation against Corcoran. Our bosses came in and lectured us, warning us never to let this happen to this firm—meaning, be careful what you put in writing, especially with red lines around it. I believe that case is still pending. Does that mean those illegal ancient practices like redlining still exist?➪➞➪➞➪➞➪➪➪➪➪➪➪➪➪➪➪➞➞➞➞➞➞➪➪➪➪ What’s more common today is banks practicing “reverse redlining,” where the bank is the aggressor, mapping out less-than-desirable neighborhoods and then seeking out minority buyers who don’t have enough money to buy a cardboard box and offering them predatory loans that are impossible to resist. The nightmare part of the American dream. Own your own home! This got us into the subprime-mortgage disaster. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is. What’s interesting is that reverse redlining is the flip side of the earlier practice we thought the Civil Rights Act would cancel: blockbusting. Redlining—maybe everything still exists. We just call them different names and have different rules for getting around them.

NEW What follows is an interview with the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park, Purple Heart, The Infidel, The Pain and the Itch, and the upcoming LCT production Domesticated), the first half of which took place between the playwright and our coexecutive editor, John Guare, in 2005, and first appeared in the Northwestern University Press edition of Purple Heart and The Infidel. This winter, Guare and Norris sat down to pick up where they left off and to discuss Chicago, Lorraine Hansberry, and Norris’s transition from life as an actor to that of a writer.

Editor: How did you come to write The Infidel? Bruce Norris: Steppenwolf Theatre had commissioned me to write a play (which I’ve now hidden away for good), they did a reading of it, didn’t produce it, and Martha Lavey [Steppenwolf’s artistic director] said, “Why don’t you take another shot?”, and they commissioned me for a second year. ED: And that turned out to be The Infidel. BN: Yes. ED: Why did Steppenwolf commission you? BN: It’s total Chicago old-boy network, or old-girl network. Martha had acted in the very first play I wrote and produced in Chicago in ’91 or ’92. It was called The Actor Retires and was literally a vanity project, because it was about my own inability to deal with vanity—the actor’s narcissism, the actor’s twin hats of being grandiose and groveling. People thought I was writing a critique of L.A., but that wasn’t it at all. Its characters, the producers, directors, whoever was being parodied, are portrayed as normal people, whereas the sick one is myself. So, it was from knowing Martha Lavey, first as an actress, then as an artistic director, that I got my first, and then a second, chance. And I thought of that story of the New York judge who stalked the woman, with which—for various reasons—I identified to an alarming degree, although I didn’t go to prison. Steppenwolf produced The Infidel, directed by Anna Shapiro [twelve years ago], to a very positive response. And it was very scary, because I was writing for voices that weren’t fa

: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE NORRIS miliar to me. Also, because The Infidel had no part for me as an actor. I felt it was my first real play. It was as if Steppenwolf was saying to me, “We’re going to produce this play with you, not as a performer, not as a scene designer, not as a director but as its writer.” That they had faith in the play based solely on its merits, that was graduation. ED: Steppenwolf then commissioned another play. BN: Yes. Purple Heart was a different kind of quasi-autobiographical play. I didn’t have to stick to the facts. The (dead) father in that play is a military man. My (living) father was a doctor—internal medicine, arthritis his specialty. He was a disciplinarian who ran the house with enormous pressure to behave in a compliant fashion. And that had to do with attitude, with language. My mother was the complete opposite, a very entertaining person to be around, very lively and fun and subversive. She had once entertained aspirations of being a painter or a costume designer but gave those up to raise my brother and sister and me and play the role of good wife and mom to my father and us. Her life somehow became unbearable and she turned into a serious drinker. And I, just like one of the characters in Purple Heart, had a grandmother who would visit us from time to time and take me aside to explain that my mother had a drinking problem, which was why she was always asleep or going away for long periods of time. Both of those plays are about something deeply personal to me, but I don’t consider either of them to be strictly autobiographical. They’re both about things that have to do with love. Both plays share a vexed relationship between a man’s sexual feelings and his romantic feelings for a woman, and those irreconcilable feelings are something I was going through at this time. ED: So, the other playwright says, without any envy at all, you’ve had four plays done at Steppenwolf. How nice for you. How many other writers have had that kind of connection with that theater? BN: I was told only one. Sam Shepard has had, like, six productions, but I’m next.

ED: Like Sam Shepard, do you think of yourself more as a playwright-actor, an actorplaywright, or a playwright who acts? BN: I guess I think of myself as a professional actor who works as an amateur playwright, because I don’t really make my living from being a playwright, and I kind of prefer it that way. It’s like being a professional poet. I don’t think there are that many. I prefer to keep making my living as an actor, because I feel like writing is too hard. ED: The Bruce Norris who writes and the Bruce Norris who acts—are they two different human beings? BN: Well, one is a social activity; the other is very private. The playwright has to become social to collaborate, but acting involves responding, whereas writing is—I don’t want to talk about it. ED: You get up every day and write? BN: In the afternoon. I usually have to leave my apartment early to do actor things. ED: Can you write when you’re in a play? BN: Actually, that’s helpful, especially when I’m performing at night. That’s always a good way to organize the day. I wake up late, and then I write. It’s much harder if you’re working on a film, because the times you’re working change every day. ED: Do you dream differently as a writer than you do as an actor? BN: Let me see. I dreamt last night that my hair was all burned off except for a ring around the edge of my scalp. I looked in the mirror and there was an enormous scar slicing across my scalp. Does that count? ED: I’d say it does. That dream has it all: flames, mirrors, vanity, wounds within the head. No doubt about it. Bruce Norris is a writer.

ED: When you wrote The Pain and the Itch, did you say, “I’ve written a play that no one will want to do”? But then people leaped to do it. BN: Well, the original script was written for Philadelphia Theatre Company. But they declined to do it because they found it, I think, in the words of the artistic director, “creepy.” And it was intended to be creepy. But then,

thankfully, Steppenwolf Theatre picked up on it. They produced it and then Playwrights Horizons produced it, and then the Royal Court in London. But the play has not been subsequently produced at many theaters, because the subject matter is, I guess, a little daunting for some subscription audiences. The play concerns a privileged liberal family whose politics are very “inclusive and progressive,” and whose behavior changes immediately when they discover that their four-year-old daughter has a venereal disease. ED: This is a play that is set in a living room. It is about the reactions of a family to this revelation, but it’s not graphically portrayed. There is no sex depicted onstage. BN: It’s not a play about sex. It’s a play about politics. ED: Was the response to the play different in different cities? BN: I think it was better received in Chicago and London than it was in New York, and I think that’s partly because the New York audience felt more directly accused. They felt that it was about privileged liberal Easterners specifically, although the city in which it takes place is never specified in the play. There’s a lot of intolerance in liberal audiences, of which I count myself a member, of any sort of self-investigation or questioning of the depths of our own principles. ED: I won’t go on to mention other plays that attack America today and our values of today, but they somehow magically put the audience in a position of moral approval, saying, “That’s not me.” BN: Well, frequently in plays there is a protagonist who demonstrates the right way to behave in a situation, and in The Pain and the Itch that character is notably absent. ED: What was the next play after The Pain and the Itch? BN: There have been a couple more plays that Steppenwolf has produced. The first was The Unmentionables, which is set in Africa. ED: You went to Africa? BN: I was only in Africa for two weeks. I basically went to cover my ass against the charge that I didn’t know what I was talking about, which was absolutely a fair accusation, but most of what I had written was about Americans abroad rather than Africans per se, and I found that pretty much con-

firmed after I had been there, so I didn’t rewrite the play. It was written after the Iraq War had started and when the torture scandals emerged. It was my response to what was going on at Guantánamo and what had happened at Abu Ghraib. ED: How do you know when you have a play? BN: I find myself in an argument, and often it’s a political argument, at a restaurant or bar with friends. And when I find myself on the losing side of that argument, and having to articulate why I’ve taken up that position, I think that’s when a play begins to percolate for me. Whenever I find myself losing, I have to understand why I can’t articulate this better, and I have to divide the argument up among various people that I

ing to suppress my political thoughts for the social niceties that my liberal friend was intent upon me observing. So that was the genesis of the outrage that the white man, Steve, in the second act of Clybourne feels. ED: Was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun a favorite of yours as a kid? Were you in some avant-garde production of Raisin in Houston? BN: (Laughter) Yes, I played Asagai. (Laughter) No. But I was exposed to that play at a very early age; I was probably twelve years old. I think it was through a social-studies class in junior high school in Houston. I was fixated on the play, because it had that great slapping scene where Lena slaps Beneatha and makes her say, “In my mother’s house there is still God.” I was a violent little

When I came north from Texas, in 1979– where I always thought we were segregated just because we Texans were all backwards hillbillies who happened to have struck oil like the Clampetts–I thought that I would find the situation in Chicago quite different. As a matter of fact, I found it embarrassingly the same. know, or various people that I’ve created, to come to some sort of solution for myself. ED: What was the argument that ignited Clybourne Park? BN: At the beginning of the Iraq War, I was in a conversation in a restaurant with some people, and I was questioning the notion of whether or not we should, in a blanket fashion, “support the troops.” I felt that we had no responsibility to support the troops if we disagreed with the campaign that they were waging. And one friend of mine, a very, very liberal woman who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, said, “Hispanics are overrepresented in the military relative to their numbers in the population.” And I said, “Well, so what you’re telling me is that I should, out of deference to the sensitivity of this particular minority, abandon my political position about the illegitimacy of a war because I should be more concerned about their feelings?” And I felt, as a white man, that kind of Rush Limbaugh outrage at hav-

child, so I found violence very appealing. Particularly when it was over some issue of theology. Fantastic. ED: Why did the play coalesce around A Raisin in the Sun? BN: Well, as a child, when I saw Raisin my point of identification with that play was the character of Karl Lindner. He’s the white man who comes to ask the Youngers not to move into Clybourne Park. That’s the character that appears in the first act of my play Clybourne Park. When I became attracted to that play, I always thought of myself as the antagonist, not as the hero. ED: You identified with Karl? BN: I identified with Karl and I identified with all of my culture, the people that I grew up around, as the people of Clybourne Park who did not want integration. ED: What was Chicago like when you first moved there?

BN: Chicago is segregated in a very specific way. The racial divide—this is not altogether true, but generally the racial divide is a horizontal line extending westward from downtown and the white people live on the North Side and the black people on the South Side. Again, obviously, there’s Hyde Park and there’s Evanston and Rogers Park and a lot of diverse neighborhoods, but by and large historically that’s been the division. So when I came north from Texas, in 1979—where I always thought we were segregated just because we Texans were all backwards hillbillies who happened to have struck oil like the Clampetts—I thought that I would find the situation in Chicago quite different. As a matter of fact, I found it embarrassingly the same.

where I was staying. So I had to drive about five miles every day to the public library to get my email. One day I opened my email in-box and I had about one hundred emails. I thought either someone I knew had died or America was under attack. Then I realized that it was actually good news, and I spent the evening celebrating by drinking rum with the diabetic ex-sailor who lives next door. (Laughter) ED: I love it. Islesboro. That’s the island that all the Scientologists own? Is it true that you’ve become a Scientologist? BN: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. And I think you shouldn’t make fun of it, because I think Scientology has a lot to offer. ED: What comes next, after the success of this wonderful play?

I find myself in an argument, and often it’s a political argument, at a restaurant or bar with friends. And when I find myself on the losing side of that argument, and having to articulate why I’ve taken up that position, I think that’s when a play begins to percolate for me.

BN: As you would know, John, when anything is successful everything else gets held up. So there are several plays that I have written in the time since Clybourne Park that still await production. One for Lincoln Center Theater, Domesticated, directed by Anna Shapiro, which will be done in 2013. Hopefully, another production for A Parallelogram. And I’m working on a script for the Royal Court. ED: You have got that thing that is a dream state for so many playwrights: you’re connected to three theaters. BN: Yes, three of the best theaters in the world, and four, actually—if you count Playwrights Horizons. ED: Are you surprised that your life is so radically different now that you’re a successful playwright? Does it feel comfortable, or do you still feel a stranger in it? BN: I feel worried and disoriented when things go well, because when things are arrayed against me, well, that’s a familiar feeling. I know who my enemy is. But when

DETROIT

By Paul Clemens

Growing up, we identified people with the church they lived nearest to. So-and-so’s family lived next door to St. Raymond. What’s-his-futz lived over by St. Jude. You know, that girl, from Guardian Angels. This was how people talked, as if street names and points on the compass were unnecessary. Everything could be oriented by one’s proximity to a particuPhotograph from The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, published by Steidl /www.steidlville.com.

ED: When did you start thinking of A Raisin in the Sun as a departure point for Clybourne Park? BN: Someone pointed out to me, John, that the summer we were in Williamstown, and I was acting in your play Chaucer in Rome, they were also doing A Raisin in the Sun at Williamstown. And in our dorm I was living down the hall from Viola Davis, who was playing Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun. Chaucer in Rome is a generational play that spans at least thirty years, and I was living down the hall from the cast of A Raisin in the Sun, a play I had always loved, so I was thinking about theater as a kind of generational experience over time. ED: Oh, how astonishing! Bruce, how did you find out that you had won the Pulitzer Prize? BN: I was up in Maine staying at Mary Zimmerman’s house, on an island called Islesboro, and I had no Internet connection

people are accepting of what I do, I don’t know quite what to do, because I don’t have anyone to fight against. ED: Oh, well, this is a serious problem. BN: Yes, I’m working on it. (Laughter) ED: How would you describe your emotions? You’re not an angry young man. BN: (Laughter) It used to be anger, and I feel that now it has subsided into a kind of vague confusion. ED: In Clybourne Park, you say that de Tocqueville says, “The story of American history is in private property.” Do you think that bleeds into your other work about what it is that we own, people trying to hang on to their private property, to what is their territory? BN: I got into a conversation yesterday with the literary manager out here at the Taper. She’s in her twenties, and she said to me that she found it upsetting that Clybourne Park doesn’t show any way forward for how we resolve the problems of race and property and territory. And I said, “But we’ve never been able to resolve them.” And she goes, “I know, but as a liberal I feel that we should.” And I said, “You know, I wish that was the case, but I’m a pessimist by nature and I don’t expect that we ever will. I think there’s something essentially rotten in human nature that will not allow us to resolve those problems.” And she said, “Well, that’s a very conservative attitude to have.” And I said, “Yes, I think it’s rather surprising that I am a liberal, because I have a rather pessimistic worldview.” ED: That’s what is so original and necessary about your plays—that you very clearly state the problem and do not offer the typical solutions. BN: Well, I don’t think our job as playwrights is to solve the world’s problems. It may be to identify what some of them are, but we’re not politicians. We are—for lack of a less pretentious word, we’re artists. ED: Then what response would you like your audience to have when they come out of the play? BN: My ideal audience response is to have them come out of the theater saying, “I don’t know what’s right anymore. I used to think I knew what was right, but I’m not sure I do.”

lar parish. But the people who spoke this language had long since left the city, leaving behind the schools and churches (over a third of which were closed in the late 1980s, a scale unprecedented in American Catholicism), and the result was an uncomfortable layering of civilizations, an unspoken, aesthetic argument between Detroit’s white ethnic past and its nonwhite present. The peeling sign that sat in front of my father’s old high school may have said DOVE ACADEMY, but the concrete scrollwork still said DE LA SALLE COLLEGIATE. Which was it? I still call the place where my cousins went to school St. Matthew, but it was closed by the archdiocese a while back. On the side of the building that faces Outer Drive, at the top, are block letters still identifying the structure as the BISHOP DONNELLY ACTIVITIES. In the ground below is another sign, identifying it as the MAYA ANGELOU ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.

DETROIT

By Paul Clemens

In grade school I had learned, from some lemon-scented nun, that one out of every five people on the planet was

By Joyce George

Chinese; since four out of five Detroiters were black, it seemed to me mathematically impossible for there to be any

In 1981, when I moved to Williamsburg, I was fresh out of college and making my way as an artist while waitressing at Dojo’s in the East Village. I couldn’t afford the $350 East Village rents and found a place in the Northside for $200. The neighborhood was inhabited by Italian-Americans and recent Polish immigrants. I rented from a woman who was rumored to have won her house in a poker game. Many of my Polish neighbors assumed from my blond hair that I was Polish. Once, a woman addressed me in Polish, and when I told her that I was American she became confused. “Well, then, where were your parents from?” she wanted to know. “Where were your grandparents from?” This went on for some time, and finally she said, “If you are American, why are you living here?”

white people in Detroit. I recalled this fourth-grade lapse in logic during these drives. Every few blocks or so we’d pass a bungalow with a fenced-off yard and flower pots on the front porch, a place that I suspected of belonging to an old white woman—a widow, I imagined, whose husband had passed away thirty years before and whose children hadn’t yet found the money to move her to the suburbs. Aside from a few downwardly mobile Desdemonas imported from the near suburbs, that seemed to be about it: half a dozen holdovers from the time when the city had mayors with last names like Miriani and one’s offspring bought a house around the corner instead of out in Oakland County. Every time we passed one of these homes, I wondered who cut the grass. This drive, part of our daily commute, was a pilgrimage that suburban Detroiters sometimes made—doors locked, windows up—to those special places that held pieces of their past. What people professed to be after from such trips tended toward the vague—they just wanted to have a look at the old place—and they were invariably disappointed afterward, as it was impossible not to be when the ostensible reason for the trip was so fundamentally dishonest. (It was to have one’s worst fears confirmed that such trips were undertaken.) Older couples drove down from the suburbs on Sunday mornings after Mass, the message of Christian charity still fresh in their ears and pleasant, anticipatory butterflies in their stomachs. As they crossed below 8 Mile, the contentment that comes of wearing one’s Sunday best began slowly to fade; smiles tightened and then disappeared altogether. By the time the car had stopped in front of the house where their children were conceived, the sound of the priest’s voice had vanished, and the message of Christian love had begun to seem almost offensively simpleminded—insipid, even. How, they asked themselves, do you extend PARADE ON GRAND STREET, 1986.

charity to this? You mean to tell me that these are the people who shall inherit the earth? They’ve already inherited Detroit, and look what they’ve done to it. Look. There was an empty plot of land where our first bungalow near 6 Mile had been. I don’t remember who discovered its absence, but it had burnt down, or otherwise disappeared, within a decade of our having sold it. The supply of abandoned homes in the city, with its preponderance of single-family structures and its rate of depopulation, was nearly endless, with stockpiles enough to last years. “To a unique degree,” Coleman Young said, seek-

that our house, rather than being a Devil’s Night fatality, had instead fallen into the hands of drug dealers and been knocked down during Young’s “Crack Down on Crack” campaign. Regardless: it took forty or fifty years for people of my grandparents’ generation to see pieces of their past begin to vanish. For people of my parents’ generation it was twenty or thirty. It took less than a decade before I began to lose the first tangible links to what became, once such links were severed, a bygone era in my life. A sense of life’s impermanence was imprinted on my psyche, along with the knowledge that nothing ever really returns. When things—neighborhoods, landmarks, businesses—go, they’re gone. It was clear that our corner of Detroit was beginning to change beyond recognition already.

has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.

All photos © Joyce George.

Paul Clemens was born in Detroit and raised on the city’s East Side. He is the author of Made in Detroit and his work

The excerpt from Made in Detroit by Paul Clemens is reproduced by permission of Doubleday.

ing to explain the Devil’s Night fires, “Detroit had buildings to burn.” It also had buildings to demolish, and it’s possible

POLISH WOMEN SUNBATHING ON THE WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT, 1985.

In grade school I had learned, from some lemon-scented nun, that one out of every five people on the planet was

By Joyce George

Chinese; since four out of five Detroiters were black, it seemed to me mathematically impossible for there to be any

has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.

All photos © Joyce George.

Paul Clemens was born in Detroit and raised on the city’s East Side. He is the author of Made in Detroit and his work

The excerpt from Made in Detroit by Paul Clemens is reproduced by permission of Doubleday.

ing to explain the Devil’s Night fires, “Detroit had buildings to burn.” It also had buildings to demolish, and it’s possible

POLISH WOMEN SUNBATHING ON THE WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT, 1985.

ITALIAN GIGLIO FESTIVAL IN WILLIAMSBURG, 1991. THE GIGLIO BEGAN IN 1903 AND CONTINUES TO THIS DAY.

BEFORE THE WEDDING, BEDFORD AVENUE, 1987.

GRAND STREET, 1986.

WAITING FOR THE L TRAIN, 1988.

I loved taking visitors from out of town to the Williamsburg waterfront. I felt like a voyeur at an illicit carnival show watching the continuous parade of hookers, mobsters, and drug dealers. Now, thirty years later, I still go down to the waterfront but, instead, enjoy the refurnished esplanade, the international cuisine, and the local Brooklyn coffee, along with the hordes of tourists. By the mid-1980s, I had begun studying photography at the International Center for Photography and landed a job shooting for The Greenline, a local paper, and I’ve been 14

taking photographs of Williamsburg ever since. While many things have improved, so much has been lost. Thousands of jobs have left the working waterfronts and factories. Our phone bills are higher today than our rent was back then. Neighborhood friends have left because they could no longer afford to buy or rent here. My husband, an urban planner, told me years ago, when I would cry every time a dry cleaner or a bodega closed down, “Honey, cities change; that’s what they do.”

CANDY STORE ON BEDFORD AVENUE AND NORTH 8TH STREET, 1985.

WORLD TRADE CENTER SEEN FROM THE WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT, 1985.

ITALIAN GIGLIO FESTIVAL IN WILLIAMSBURG, 1991. THE GIGLIO BEGAN IN 1903 AND CONTINUES TO THIS DAY.

BEFORE THE WEDDING, BEDFORD AVENUE, 1987.

GRAND STREET, 1986.

WAITING FOR THE L TRAIN, 1988.

CANDY STORE ON BEDFORD AVENUE AND NORTH 8TH STREET, 1985.

WORLD TRADE CENTER SEEN FROM THE WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT, 1985.

BLACK,

By Patricia and Fredrick McKissack

LITTLE LEAGUE TEAMS IN A LOCAL PARK, 1989.

MY SONS ON KENT AVENUE WHICH AT THE TIME WAS TYPICALLY DESERTED, 2005.

MY SONS AT THE RECENTLY LAUNCHED EAST RIVER FERRY DOCK, 2012.

CELEBRATING THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL AT A NEIGHBOR’S BACKYARD POOL, 2008.

The night A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway, the history books were rewritten and a lot of stereotypes about blacks were dimmed if not altogether erased. The moment Lloyd Richards came out on stage following the performance, the audience stood and roared their approval. After the crowd had applauded for a full fifteen minutes, Sidney Poitier went into the audience and escorted the playwright to the stage. Nannie Hansberry was heard by a Vogue magazine reporter to say, “That’s my daughter.” While the theater shook with another round of thunderous applause, Lorraine Hansberry took her bows as the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. In the audience that night was Alice Childress, the first black woman to have a play produced off-Broadway, Trouble in Mind, which had won an Obie in 1955. Not present, but standing with her spirit, were other black women dramatists who had blazed the trail for Hansberry. Angelina Grimke’s Rachel was the first black play on record performed by blacks in the twentieth century, March 3, 1916, in Washington, D.C.. Alice Dunbar Nelson (former wife of the deceased poet Paul Laurence Dunbar) wrote Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory in 1918 to protest the treatment of black soldiers who were fighting in Europe for freedom, yet whose families didn’t have freedom at home. Mary Burrill in They That Sit in Darkness advanced the cause of birth control, especially for poor women. Between 1920-50, Marita Bonner wrote The Purple Flower, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes collaborated on Mule Bone, and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Saturday Morning in the South confronted lynching and racial violence head-on. All these playwrights had offered alternatives to the degrading minstrel show stereotypes, but none of them had reached Broadway. Lorraine made it, and in so doing had scored a victory for them all. Her recognition validated the work of other women who had been denied access to Broadway because of racism and sexism. On April 7, 1959, six weeks shy of her twenty-ninth birthday, Lorraine Hansberry won the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year, edging out plays such as Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Archibald MacLeish’s JB, and Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. She was the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman, and the first black dramatist to win the coveted award.

In her acceptance speech she said, “I cannot adequately tell you what recognition and tribute mean to the young writer and, I am sure, to the young artist of all fields. One works, one dreams, and, if one is lucky, one actually produces. But true fulfillment only comes when our fellows say: ‘Ah, we understand, we appreciate, we enjoy….’” The cards, letters, and telegrams written by Hansberry admirers poured in by the hundreds. Her private life was invaded by requests for public interviews and appearances, but at first she didn’t seem to mind. She enthusiastically told an interviewer that her success felt “wonderful, it’s wonderful…I’m enjoying every bit of it. I’ve tried to go to everything I’ve been invited to and—I shouldn’t even say this on the air—but so far I’ve tried to answer every piece of correspondence I get….” Over the next few years, Lorraine answered letters from fans all over the globe, from Hollywood celebrities, housewives, students, fellow writers, and teachers. ✦ A Raisin in the Sun was different from any other play that had ever been produced on Broadway, so naturally it was closely scrutinized by the media. And, of course, everything the playwright said was also analyzed. [There were] interviews with television reporter Mike Wallace and radio talk-show host Studs Terkel; in addition to reviews, speeches and scores of newspaper and magazine articles serve as the primary sources of Hansberry’s public statements. Not all the reviews and criticisms of Raisin were good, which Hansberry fully expected. What she didn’t expect were the gross misconceptions that developed about herself and her work. For example, she seemed deeply concerned that some whites just “didn’t get it.” The white, male-dominated press applauded Raisin for not being a “Negro play” but one that was universal, which implied that her black characters could be replaced with white characters and the story would be the same. She agreed in part, saying, “I don’t think there is anything more universal in the world than man’s oppression to man…,” but Hansberry refused to allow others to define the “universal” meaning of her play. She insisted that “one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that, in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific.” Hansberry argued that

her play was most definitely about a very specific black family who lived on the South Side of Chicago. In that sense it was a very “Negro play.” Repeatedly, Hansberry tried to clarify her intentions: “The thing I tried to show,” she said, “was the many gradations even in one Negro family, the clash of the old and new, but most of all the unbelievable courage of the Negro people.” Still the misconceptions persisted. Whites embraced the play without fully understanding its implications, but she was equally distressed that many blacks attacked the play simply because whites liked it. Some black critics thought the playwright had “sought integration through the whitening of her characters.” This initial misunderstanding led many people to believe that Hansberry’s goal was to “convince whites that blacks were exactly like them, and that therefore full integration could take place without seriously disturbing the status quo or forcing hard sacrifices.” Margaret Just Butcher in “Postscript 1971” in The Negro in American Culture said although Raisin involved black people, it dealt “with common problems confronting a family that happened to be black.” Other more militant voices accused the playwright of being too bourgeois and questioned how a middle-class intellectual could be sensitive to the needs of poor blacks. To which the artist responded: I come from an extremely comfortable background, materially speaking. And yet, we live in a ghetto…which automatically means intimacy with all classes and all kinds of experiences. It’s not any more difficult for me to know the people I wrote about than it is for me to know members of my family. This is one of the things that the American experience has meant to Negroes. We are one people. Hansberry made no apologies for her work then and it doesn’t need any today. A Raisin in the Sun is a classic that has survived the test of time. Patricia C. McKissack and Fredrick L. McKissack have written many award-winning books for young people, including Young, Black, and Determined, Ma Dear’s Aprons, and Black Diamond. They have received the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Nonfiction, and the Regina Medal, among other honors.

BLACK,

By Patricia and Fredrick McKissack

LITTLE LEAGUE TEAMS IN A LOCAL PARK, 1989.

MY SONS ON KENT AVENUE WHICH AT THE TIME WAS TYPICALLY DESERTED, 2005.

MY SONS AT THE RECENTLY LAUNCHED EAST RIVER FERRY DOCK, 2012.

CELEBRATING THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL AT A NEIGHBOR’S BACKYARD POOL, 2008.

BLOCK

By Bill Savage

of the city that mattered most as the American drama of racial conflict played out across the landscape of Chicago’s neighborhoods. ✷✷✷✷

to reservations west of the Mississippi River in 1835, after the Treaty of Chicago. Archibald Clybourne died in 1872, the year after the Great Fire, and his descendants live in the city still. ✷✷✷✷

Chicago neighborhoods signify more than geographic designations. They grew as ethnic and racially distinct enclaves, urban industrial villages, because of the American dynamic of identity: old-timers didn’t want newcomers living among them, and newcomers gained some advantages by living with one another, until their children intermarried or they fled the next wave of newcomers. Industry was spread throughout the city, and it was possible to go to school and church, to work and to play, within a short walk or streetcar ride, which helped foster neighborhood identity. This form of identity could be a positive thing, a way of constructing communities based on shared experiences of the traumas of immigration and marginalization. Or it could be negative, a way of defining the self and the group in opposition to various Others, ethnic and racial groups with which one competed for jobs and power and the very space of the city, sometimes violently. As Mike Royko put it, you could always tell what neighborhood you were in by the food, the language, and “by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock.” In any neighborhood, other levels of identity nestle within one another. Religion and economic status parallel and reinforce racial and ethnic identities, but it eventually comes back to geography, precisely where one lives: the particular block and building. These were the units

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There is no Clybourne Park. When Lorraine Hansberry gave the address 406 Clybourne Street to the home purchased by the striving African-American Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun, she surely knew that Chicago’s street numbers are based on a Euclidean grid system: State Street is the east–west axis, Madison Street the north–south. Every address places you relative to the zero-point intersection at State and Madison in the Loop. Every street has a north/south or east/west designation, and every address tells you how far from State or Madison a place is located: every 800 numbers equal a mile. So Chicago Avenue, at 800 north, is one mile north of Madison; if you’re at 406 West Chicago Avenue, you’re a half-mile-and-change west of State Street. While there is a Clybourn (no “e”) Avenue, it runs northwest from about 420 West Division Street, at 1200 north. 406 Clybourne Street does not exist. Of course, many Chicago neighborhoods are named for parks: Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, Marquette Park. While the half-acre Clybourn Playlot Park at 1755 Clybourn Avenue dates from 1943, Chicago has no neighborhood called Clybourne Park. Yet the place name resonates back to the earliest changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of this city built on a swamp. In 1823, Archibald Clybourne (sometimes with an “e,” sometimes without) came to what would become Chicago, and the street is named for him, and the playlot is named for the street. He was the city’s first commercial butcher, so he might be considered the founder of the industry that once made Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World.” Or, from the point of view of the Native American Potawatomi tribe, which lived here before any of his kind moved into the neighborhood, he might be considered one of Chicago’s first gentrifiers. The Potawatomi were removed

White flight is often associated with the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, where it dovetailed with postwar deindustrialization and suburbanization. But the pattern of white residents abandoning neighborhoods when African-Americans moved in began decades earlier. In Chicago, thousands of African-Americans moving North to work in factories and to escape the Jim Crow and Lynch Laws in the South were confined by racist real-estate practices and legal covenants to a narrow strip of the city, on either side of State Street south of Twenty-second Street. But as the black population grew, this Black Belt expanded inexorably, first south and then east and west, and neighborhoods on its boundaries changed, block by block, from white to black. As early as the 1920s, profiteering landlords subdivided single-family homes or multiflat buildings into “kitchenette” apartments, and buildings designed for two or three families might house a dozen or more. In one short story, James T. Farrell describes his writer alter ego Danny O’Neill returning to his old neighborhood on Fifty-seventh Street in Washington Park, by then a black ghetto, where the building his family once occupied has been subdivided to the point where the coal cellar was an apartment. This overcrowding caused the deterioration of the housing stock, and that deterioration, along with political neglect and the consequent lack of city services, helped create the ghetto that anyone with any means wanted out of. After racial covenants and other legal barriers to African-Americans living wherever they could afford to live were struck down by the courts (owing, in part, to a lawsuit brought by Hansberry’s father), only violence or the threat of it could prevent the change in the racial makeup of Chicago’s neighborhoods. And violence was common, taking place with the complicity of the city authorities. In the 1960 census, Bridgeport’s population was 99.7 percent white, .02 black and .01 other. In 1964, a liberal-minded building owner rented an apartment in Bridgeport, less than two blocks from Mayor Daley’s bungalow, to two African-American college students. After a weekend of near-riots, the mob broke in and smeared excrement on the walls. The students returned home to find what remained of their belongings being held for them at the local police station, along with directions to move out. The building’s owner soon sold his property, after city inspectors told him what it would cost to get it up to code. Racial prejudice reliably produces self-fulfilling prophecies. If enough people really believe that the neighborhood will go to hell if “they” move in, and those people abandon their home, block, and neighborhood at the first sight of “them,” then the neighborhood will indeed disappear as its residents desert it and flee to the suburbs. The drama of racial prejudice and change played out at the level of individual homes, on particular blocks, where real-estate agents smelled money and perfected the art of “blockbusting.” Blockbusting worked like this: A real-estate agent would buy a home on a block and then either sell that home to an AfricanAmerican or merely spread rumors that “they” were moving in. Then nearby homeowners would fall over one another to sell before “they” moved in. Blockbusting set neighbor against neighbor, because if you were among the last owners on your block to sell you might not even get what you paid for your home, as property values plummeted.

Of course, those homes were then sold to African-American buyers for more than the going rate, with the real-estate agents sticking it to both sides. This avaricious process transformed neighborhoods across Chicago’s South and West Sides from white to black at what seemed impossible speeds. The Chicago journalist Tom McNamee, raised in one such area, described his experience: Growing up in Chicago, I never saw a black person west of Halsted. And then I did, but not west of Racine. And then I did, but not west of Western. And then I did, and the whole neighborhood broke up, like somebody flicked the lights a couple of times and said “Closing time.” Difference is real, and thinking about identity across barriers always requires a decision: Do people choose to emphasize the things they have in common, or the things that divide them? White flight took place before no-interest loans that allow people to buy property with little or no money down. In these decades, African-Americans who wanted to buy a home in any neighborhood, white or black, had to have substantial down payments in hand. They would have shared a class identity with their new neighbors. But race trumps class in the American poker game of prejudice, and in neighborhood after neighborhood white homeowners didn’t see shared class status with their new black neighbors; they saw only the racial Other. Some Chicago neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs, like Beverly and Oak Park, managed to integrate relatively peacefully, as community organizations emphasized class commonality over racial difference. But even these areas, if you look block by block rather than at the whole neighborhood, are pocket-segregated, with sub-neighborhoods as racially distinct as entire neighborhoods used to be. ✷✷✷✷

Contemporary gentrification is like the negative of a film of white flight, played in reverse. Affluent home buyers, white and black, move into formerly blighted areas that have been redeveloped. Chicago has experienced this phenomenon along the south lakefront and adjacent to the Loop, especially on the near North Side, close to the starting point of Clybourn Avenue. There the Cabrini-Green housing projects have been demolished and replaced with what are essentially gated suburban subdivisions plopped down into the urban grid. But the most dramatic change was on the near South Side. Between 2000 and 2009, the Maxwell Street area was transformed from 100 percent African-American to 50 percent white and 26 percent Latino. That change, wrought by the city and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as by the expansion of the Latino Pilsen community, is the latest iteration of institutional gentrification. Old, falling-down buildings replaced with shiny new condos; warehouses and factories rehabbed into lofts. But it’s the same old story: they move in, and we move out; or we move in, and they move out. In January of 2011, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research published a study on urban segregation in the United States. It found that Chicago, though less segregated than it once was, remains the most segregated big city in America. Bill Savage is Distinguished Senior Lecturer in English at Northwestern University, where he teaches Chicago literature, history, and culture. He has lived in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood his entire life.

BLOCK

By Bill Savage

of the city that mattered most as the American drama of racial conflict played out across the landscape of Chicago’s neighborhoods. ✷✷✷✷

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By J. Stephen Brantley

3 A.M.

[Just yards apart but worlds away, Adela sings to herself as she brings out a bag of garbage.] ADELA: Del cielo cayó una rosa / Mi mamá la recogió Se la puso en la cabeza / ¡Qué bonita le quedó! (A rose fell from the sky / My mother picked it up She wore it on her head / How nice it looks on her!) [Devaj is entranced. Salim snaps him out of it.]

Jackson Heights, a garden community built in the exuberance of the 1920s with open fields and a country club, its main street decorated in a Tudor style, was a mere fourteen minutes from Times Square on the No. 7. Very peaceful. Very white. The happiness of living here was guaranteed in the first-ever radio commercial broadcast on WJZ in 1923. We moved there in 1943, to an apartment on the same block as St. Joan of Arc, so that I needn’t cross the street to go to grammar school. The country club closed. Developers built apartment houses in the empty fields. The garden aspect vanished. People remembered the way it was and weren’t happy. I go there today, see Mumbai on Seventy-fourth Street, see the signs in Spanish alongside the Tudor ornamentation on Eighty-second Street, feel the pulsing new life, and am thrilled at the way life rejuvenates itself. —John Guare ♥♥♥ ♥♥ ♥ Devaj is a Bangladeshi livery cab driver in love with Adela, an Equadorian woman who works in a bakery on Roosevelt Avenue. As he speaks no Spanish, and she only a bit of English and no Bengali, it will take a tragedy to finally bring them together. Along the way, Lindi, a Mexican girl trapped in prostitution; Salim, a conveniencestore owner; and other Jackson Heights residents alternately foil and encourage their romance.

SALIM: Devaj! Hello? [Adela sees Lindi peering from behind her window’s security gate.] ADELA: Hello? Hola! [Lindi ducks out of sight, but quickly returns. Satisfied that it’s safe to speak…] LINDI: Buenas. You work in the bakery.

[He goes. Devaj’s friend Salim enters, muttering lotto numbers.]

SALIM: I’m fine. Devaj? Doesn’t your shift begin any minute? DEVAJ: Must people always be in such a hurry? SALIM: You drive a taxi, Devaj.

[Salim imitates a culinary tourist on a recipe quest.]

SALIM: A Jackson Heights legend!

LINDI: I am practicing my English! ¡Tienes que aprender el ingles si quieres viajar el mundo! (You have to learn English if you want to go places!) Someday I am getting out of here. Pero no puedo regresar a mi país.... (But I can’t go back to my country….)

DEVAJ: If we tell you where it is, it will not be a secret anymore.

ADELA: ¿Ahora? (Now?) Collage by Tamar Cohen.

DEVAJ: Tumi kemon achho? (How are you?)

DEVAJ: Well, it is easier to pronounce.

ADELA: ¿En español por favor?

LINDI: ¿Quieres que te enseñe? (Do you want me to teach you?)

SALIM: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42…Devaj! Keb kobhor? (What’s up?)

(People eat here.)

LINDI: It make me think of pastelería in my country. Cakes so big, bigger than me! It seem so long ago.…

ADELA: Somos del Ecuador. Me encanta Nueva York, pero hay tanto trabajo. No tengo tiempo de tomar clases de inglés. Y me da miedo ablar. (We are from Ecuador. I love New York, but there’s so much work to do. I don’t have time to take English classes. And I’m afraid to speak it.)

MR. MENDEZ: De nada.

DEVAJ: Exactly. As if we have no theater right here in Queens! - - - ekhane - - - khye. SALIM: Many people come here. Lokera

SALIM: “Excuse me. I am so sorry to bother you, but can you tell me how I might find the secret spice shop?” - DEVAJ: Oha gopana masala- dokana! (Oh, the secret spice shop!)

LINDI: Sí.

DEVAJ: Oh. Yes. Thank you.

SALIM:“We have tickets to Jersey Boys! Step on it!”

SALIM: They all just go to Jackson Diner. “We read about it in The Namesake. It is so authentic.”

ADELA: Mexico?

MR. MENDEZ: “Good evening. I would like a cup of coffee and a sweet bun, please.”

[Devaj and Salim in mid-conversation.] DEVAJ: Ami sob rasta janee. (I know all the streets.) But people just want to get there quickly. Tartaree, tartaree! (Hurry, hurry!) No one ever says, “On our way to the airport, we wish to stop to admire the fountain at Washington Plaza....”

ADELA and DEVAJ: Yes. SALIM: This is why you are lurking about!

DEVAJ and LINDI: Smells so good.

DEVAJ: Pardon me, señor. How would you say “Good evening. I would like a cup of coffee and a sweet bun, please”?

LINDI: No no no no…

DEVAJ: “Take me to the best Indian restaurant! The one where you would go.”

DEVAJ: I am not lurking. It just…

[Devaj stands outside an Ecuadorian bakery, Cositas Ricas, composing his thoughts. Pablo’s father walks by.]

[They laugh.]

SALIM: The bakery!

[Devaj pulls Salim away.]

SCENE 6: Cositas Ricas, 11 P.M.

ADELA: “Please enjoy this sweet bread on a house.” ¿Encima de una casa? (On a house?)

LINDI: Sí. What would you like to say? ADELA: Okay…I like to say…por favor, disfrute de este pan dulce libre de cargo. (…please enjoy this sweet bread, free of charge.) LINDI: “Please enjoy this sweet bread on a house.”

SALIM: “Oh, please? My fiancé is just mad for curry. And I’ve come all the way from the Upper East Side.…” DEVAJ: They buy their methi and then they are gone again. Aste tarpoole jache… (Coming and going…) ADELA: Gracias. Adíos. LINDI: ¡No te vayas! (Don’t go!) I know the song you were singing. But with different words. [She sings.] Del jardín del aire vienes y por eso te escogí, ahora aunque el mundo se oponga tienes que ser para mí. (You come from the garden of air and that is why I chose you, Now even if the world is opposed you have to be mine.) [Adela joins her.]

By J. Stephen Brantley

3 A.M.

[He goes. Devaj’s friend Salim enters, muttering lotto numbers.]

SALIM: I’m fine. Devaj? Doesn’t your shift begin any minute? DEVAJ: Must people always be in such a hurry? SALIM: You drive a taxi, Devaj.

[Salim imitates a culinary tourist on a recipe quest.]

SALIM: A Jackson Heights legend!

DEVAJ: If we tell you where it is, it will not be a secret anymore.

ADELA: ¿Ahora? (Now?) Collage by Tamar Cohen.

DEVAJ: Tumi kemon achho? (How are you?)

DEVAJ: Well, it is easier to pronounce.

ADELA: ¿En español por favor?

LINDI: ¿Quieres que te enseñe? (Do you want me to teach you?)

SALIM: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42…Devaj! Keb kobhor? (What’s up?)

(People eat here.)

LINDI: It make me think of pastelería in my country. Cakes so big, bigger than me! It seem so long ago.…

MR. MENDEZ: De nada.

DEVAJ: Exactly. As if we have no theater right here in Queens! - - - ekhane - - - khye. SALIM: Many people come here. Lokera

SALIM: “Excuse me. I am so sorry to bother you, but can you tell me how I might find the secret spice shop?” - DEVAJ: Oha gopana masala- dokana! (Oh, the secret spice shop!)

LINDI: Sí.

DEVAJ: Oh. Yes. Thank you.

SALIM:“We have tickets to Jersey Boys! Step on it!”

SALIM: They all just go to Jackson Diner. “We read about it in The Namesake. It is so authentic.”

ADELA: Mexico?

MR. MENDEZ: “Good evening. I would like a cup of coffee and a sweet bun, please.”

ADELA and DEVAJ: Yes. SALIM: This is why you are lurking about!

DEVAJ and LINDI: Smells so good.

DEVAJ: Pardon me, señor. How would you say “Good evening. I would like a cup of coffee and a sweet bun, please”?

LINDI: No no no no…

DEVAJ: “Take me to the best Indian restaurant! The one where you would go.”

DEVAJ: I am not lurking. It just…

[Devaj stands outside an Ecuadorian bakery, Cositas Ricas, composing his thoughts. Pablo’s father walks by.]

[They laugh.]

SALIM: The bakery!

[Devaj pulls Salim away.]

SCENE 6: Cositas Ricas, 11 P.M.

ADELA: “Please enjoy this sweet bread on a house.” ¿Encima de una casa? (On a house?)

LINDI and ADELA: Que quede escrito en el cielo que quede escrito en el mar que quede escrito en tu mente que cada día yo te quiero mucho más

[They laugh a little.] LINDI: That man is in love with you. ADELA: ¿Que? You must be thinking of mi hermana. Todos los hombres estan enamorados de ella. (All the men are in love with her.) LINDI: No, it’s you. I see how he look at you. El de la India. (The one from India.) ADELA: I see him every night! Él conduce un taxi. Su día comienza en la noche. Hago pasteles mientras duerme… [She sighs.]

SALIM: You should be careful. Some people say the drivers should be punished for knowingly transporting these men. DEVAJ: Sometimes I drive the girls, too. They tell me things, I don’t know why. SALIM: They trust you. You have a kind face. DEVAJ: They say the big shots are the worst. They say these are the men who will hurt them, the ones who offer them extra money for special favors, who wear gold watches and too much cologne. DEVAJ and LINDI: Sometimes I think that smell will drive me crazy! LINDI: I have dreams of desserts. ADELA: I bring you sweet. LINDI: You will? ADELA: ¿Y tu me enceñarás ingles? Poquito a poco? (And you will teach me English? A little at a time?)

LINDI: ¿En ingles…? (In English…?)

LINDI: ¡Sí! ¡Gracias!

ADELA: I bake while he sleep.

ADELA: De nada.

LINDI: You are in love with him, too!

LINDI: ¿Que…?

ADELA: I think of him when I make pan dulce! When I am stirring in the sugar, when I’m kneading the dough. It makes me careful. It stops me from spilling the vanilla. Voy a usar la cantidad correcta de la mantequilla, just the right amount of butter, the best kind, because someday. Maybe today. Maybe he come in! And ask for a café con leche, and have my pan dulce, and smile so my life is like honey.

ADELA: You…are…welcome!

ADELA: He is handsome like a movie star! Me encanta la mañera en que su pelo negro brilla en la luz de la calle. (I like the way his black hair shines in the light of the streetlamp.)

SALIM: No more of this talk, Devaj. Cheer up. The next time a tourist asks you about the secret spice shop, here is what you do. Tell them go to Patel Brothers, walk to the back of the store, ask for a man called Ravi, and say to him, “Amar hovercraft eel-e bhorti hoye gechhe.” DEVAJ: “Amar hovercraft eel-e bhorti hoye gechhe?” SALIM: Yes. DEVAJ: “My hovercraft is full of eels?”

LINDI: You can’t even look at him!

SALIM: A bit of fun!

ADELA: We don’t speak the same language!

DEVAJ: You are terrible!

LINDI: Maybe you don’t have to. You are lucky to have a man look at you that way.

SALIM: And you are late for work. Now stop mooning and drive! Jao! Jao! (Go! Go!)

ADELA: ¿De que manera? LINDI: Like you are a princess. Every girl should have that. Every girl should have a prince…. [Lindi goes quiet. Back to Devaj and Salim.] DEVAJ: I don’t mind the tourists as much as the men coming for sex. SALIM: How can you tell? DEVAJ: They have their money out before we’ve crossed the Fifty-ninth

Exeunt. This scene is excerpted from Jackson Heights 3 A.M., a theater piece conceived and directed by Ari Laura Kreith and co-authored by Jenny Lyn Bader, J. Stephen Brantley, Ed Cardona, Jr., Les Hunter, Tom Miller, Melisa Tien, and Joy Tamasko. The play premiered at Theatre 167. This scene was written by J. Stephen Brantley, who has written for Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab and PS 122. His plays have been performed in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. His work on Jackson Heights 3 A.M. was inspired by time spent in the neighborhood’s bars and bakeries.

LINDI: Que romántico. (So romantic.)

By Gwendolyn Brooks © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos.

(Let it be written in the sky Let it be written in the sea Let it be written in your mind that every day I love you more)

KITCHENETTE

Street Bridge! Who would take a taxi to a ninety-nine-cent store? They all get out at that corner and walk to where the girls are kept.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.” But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall, Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms Even if we were willing to let it in, Had time to warm it, keep it very clean, Anticipate a message, let it begin? We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, brought her instant critical acclaim. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, which won her Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize for poetry, and became the first AfricanAmerican to win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, she was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She died in 2000. 23