Bruce Norris' ingenious Clybourne Park sharply stings and then bites while it dances around the tenuous civilities practiced in race relations. Despite the progress made with this issue in the last few decades and the struggling liberal attitudes of our melting pot society, acknowledgement of our doubts, fears, prejudices, and superstitions have rarely been treated in a play this funny and honest. But more than race relations, Mr. Norris' work is about the cyclical phenomenon of human foibles and migratory habits.

It is 1959 in Act I. We enter the house of Bev and Russ, a home where we immediately sense that something is very wrong, especially when Jim, Bev and Russ' minister, arrives to check up on the couple while they pack up their belongings in preparation for their move to a new neighborhood. All seems right with Bev but something is definitely gnawing at Russ. In a short while we learn that their son has died and the circumstances of his death are cause for alarm. However, Bev and Russ' neighbors are more upset about something else - that the house has been sold to a family of color. In fact one neighbor is heading up a coalition to prohibit the sale. His name is Karl, a character we recognize from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and it is the Younger family from that play who is buying the house. Karl's pregnant and deaf wife, Betsy, is oblivious to the escalating arguments that occur in the presence of Bev and Russ' black housekeeper and her husband, Francine and Albert. Violence, perhaps of a different nature, looks likely to revisit this troubled home.

It is 2009 in Act II. The house is to be partially demolished and then expanded by a couple, Lindsey and Steve, who are expecting their first child, a boy. The neighborhood has now become predominantly African-American and the house has become part of a housing project. The current owners, Kevin and Lena, have inherited the home as relatives of the matriarch Lena Younger and her family and it carries with it important memories and cultural significance. The area is in transition again - gentrification allowing money to 'restore' a bogus idea of history. Oddly though, with everyone's equality firmly established, resentment and prejudice nevertheless rear their collective heads and violence looms in the doorways and windows of a house literally divided.

Though it helps to know Ms. Hansberry's play, it's not necessary. It does however add another layer to how the tables get turned and turned again. How much of the topsy-turvy (a phrase we hear early on) is deliberate on Mr. Norris' part can be debated. I couldn't help but read an incredible amount of subsumed symbolism into his two sets of characters. When the actors for Act I's Karl and Betsy take on Act II's Steve and Lindsey, Steve is still bigoted but it bubbles up from a completely different place while Lindsey doesn't want to hear anything, from the sex of her yet to be born child - a boy, to anything that smacks of prejudice; one wonders who is the boss in Francine and Albert's marriage of Act I and again in Kevin and Lena's marriage in Act II (women's lib possibly the cause); and is it merely coincidence that Jim, the minister of Act I becomes Tom, the gay real estate attorney in Act II? And there is much, much more.

Pam MacKinnon directs with an uncanny insight that allows for huge laughs as well as gasps of recognition. Daniel Ostling's set survives the troubles the play gives it admirably and Iona Somogyi's clothes are dead on for both eras. Except for some missteps in the first act, the cast is exceptional, and those missteps I suspect are directorial. Christina Kirk lays on the ditzy façade to hide Bev's pain a little too thickly to be believable, and Brendan Griffin has the same problem showing too much of Jim's false clerical compassion. Both actors come into their own in Act II. Crystal A. Dickinson and Damon Gupton as the coloreds of Act I and the African-Americans of Act II do lovely work. Ms. Dickinson smartly emphasizes a contemporary black woman's need to let false pride direct her life, and Mr. Gupton cleverly demonstrates that sometimes all that changes for a black man is his attire. Enough can't be said about Annie Parisse and Jeremy Shamos. Ms. Parisse is unrecognizable from Act I to ACT II, and Mr. Shamos looks like he just left the Younger household to come to Bev and Russ, while in the second act lets the deeply buried 'Karl' sneak up and out of the very liberal Steve. Though he pushes the humor somewhat in Act II, Frank Wood as Dan and especially as Russ is superb.

With the hauntingly eerie ending, Mr. Norris lets a message ring out quietly but clearly, and as topsy-turvy as the play has been all along, the coup arrives when comedy flips to tragedy.

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