CHS's Clybourne Park Premiere's Thursday

Columbia High School’s Parnassian Society will present the Pulitzer Prize winning play CLYBOURNE PARK in the Black Box Theatre November 21, 22, 23, and 24. Tickets are $12.

This wickedly funny and fiercely provocative play about race, real estate, and the volatile values of each won nearly every honor the theatre has to give, including the Olivier Award, the Evening Standard Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Honored, acclaimed and completely outrageous, CLYBOURNE PARK quickly became Broadway’s hottest ticket.

Both halves of his play are about a fight over a plain little house in the (fictional) neighborhood of Clybourne Park. In 1959, a three-generation black family from a ghetto on the South Side has just purchased it and is preparing to move in—over the objections of a neighborhood association that wants to keep its enclave lily-white. By 2009, that battle over integration is half-forgotten ancient history. 

Clybourne Park, like so many other urban neighborhoods nationwide, had long ago turned black in the wake of wholesale white flight to the suburbs. The house has since devolved into a graffiti-defaced teardown, battered by decades of poverty, crime, drugs, and neglect. But lo and behold, the neighborhood is “changing” again. A young white suburban couple is moving back into the rapidly gentrifying Clybourne Park. 

It’s convenient for work, and there’s a new Whole Foods besides! The only hitch is that middle-class African-Americans in the present-day neighborhood association are as hostile to white intruders as their racist white antecedents were to black homebuyers 50 years earlier.

Cast members include: Keenan Kariotis, Carolyne Leys, Liana Runcie, Arthur Hunking, Greg Roman, Eli Weisenfeld, Mariana Lopez, Harrison Clarke, Lara Phillips, Ali Pease, Aaron Braden, Maddy Thigpen, Omowumi Mebude, Daniel Zona and Jacob Lazen.

Tickets are $12 and are available by calling 973-713-6866.