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Clybourne Park

  • Patta Perspectives

Clybourne Park

This Spring, Dutch theatre company Well Made Productions presents the Dutch premiere Clybourne Park at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). It marks the first Dutch production of American playwright Bruce Norris' Pulitzer, Tony and Oliver Award winning play about race and gentrification. Award-winning company Well Made Productions – 2017's recipients of the prestigious Amsterdam Award for the Arts - present the play as the third part of its cycle of works on black identity, in coproduction with International Theater Amsterdam and Likeminds.

In Clybourne Park, Norris presents a story both universal and current: how the gentrification of neighbourhoods can lead to racial tensions. This theme is of great contemporary relevance to the Netherlands, and Clybourne Park provides an ingenious insight into the ways in which different groups of people claim ownership of spaces both private and public. Well Made Productions feel that current tensions in the housing market in the Netherlands' major cities provide an appropriate backdrop to a play about the complexities of migration – both locally and internationally. Clybourne Park's satirical bent offers exactly the right amount of humour and drama to investigate such societal issues.

Clybourne Park

In the Chicago suburb Clybourne Park, a house is being sold to a black family - the first black family in this hitherto exclusively white neighbourhood. But the neighbours begin to worry about their community: before you know it, the neighbourhood may become uninhabitable.

Years later, young urban professionals Steve and Lindsey buy the same house in Clybourne Park with a view to knocking it down and building a lavish family home, thus gentrifying their piece of the now predominantly black neighbourhood. Again, the neighbours express concern: before you know it, the neighbourhood may become unaffordable.

Find more info and tickets here.