Clybourne Park Most theatergoers are familiar with the poem by African-American writer Langston Hughes, which asks "What happens to a dream deferred?" One of the possibilities offered in Hughes's poem is "Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?" This gives the title to Lorraine Hansberry's legendary 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun, about the attempts of an African-American family to purchase a house in a largely-white suburb. Bruce Norris's 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning play Clybourne Park is, in many ways, a contemporary rewrite of Hansberry's play -- but it seems to explore the possibility that Langston Hughes hinted at in the last line of his poem: "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it explode?" Certainly Grant Mudge's production of Clybourne Park, now running at Notre Dame University, is an explosive event -- the fireworks fly onstage in the lively impassioned performances by the ensemble cast, and they continue in discussions held by audience members afterward.

Norris' play is, inescapably, about Obama's America, and more specifically about the widespread but contentious...

He uses the premise of Lorraine Hansberry's original play to show events taking place before and after the aspiring African-American family tries to buy their house in a white neighborhood in 1959. As a result, the two acts of the play feature two different sets of characters, but taking place in the same house. In the first act, we see the story of A Raisin in the Sun told from the perspective of the white characters (one of whom is the only white character in Hansberry's original play). In the second act, circumstances have changed: the neighborhood is now entirely black, but undergoing gentrification. So we see, with some historical irony, a white couple 50 years later undergoing difficulties in attempting to purchase a house in an all-black neighborhood.
If anyone in 2014 doubts that the contemporary scenario in Norris' play is somehow incapable of stirring the same kind of passions and prejudices that integration stirred in Hansberry's day, a quick Google search for "Spike Lee + gentrification" will make it clear that Norris…