“Clybourne Park,” Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-prize-winning drama, is back on the roster of Broadway spring openings. Jordan Roth, the 36-year-old head of Jujamcyn Theatres, announced this morning that he would step in as lead producer after a nasty tangle between the playwright and the powerful producer Scott Rudin (“No Country for Old Men,” “The Book of Mormon”) briefly sent the production into limbo.
Norris, an actor as well as a playwright, had bowed out of playing the older brother in an HBO pilot production of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” which Rudin is producing. Rudin, who is known for his take-no-prisoners style, launched a retaliatory strike last Wednesday when he informed Michael Riedel that he was canceling not only “Clybourne Park” but also two other Norris plays which he was developing for Broadway. Norris abandoned the pilot after months of protracted negotiations during which, according to a statement from Rudin, Norris made “more and more outrageous demands in the hope we would turn him down, and that he would not have to face the responsibility of reneging on a commitment he made.” Norris responded by saying, “I feel my priority needs to be writing rather than acting.”
That “Clybourne Park” is back on the boards comes as little surprise. After productions off-Broadway and London, the drama comes garlanded with rave reviews and numerous awards. And its small cast of seven, relatively low capitalization ($2 to $2.5 million), and provocative subject matter make it catnip to producers. The play is a satirical expansion on Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal 1959 drama, “A Raisin in the Sun.” The first act, set in ’59, deals with the tensions generated when white residents of a Chicago suburb realize that their neighborhood is about to be integrated. Half a century later, black residents are resisting the gentrification heralded by a white couple now wanting to buy that same house, tear it down, and build a McMansion.
The Broadway-bound production of “Clybourne Park” is now at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where LA Times critic Charles McNulty praised it as “smart, abrasively funny, and fiendishly provocative.” Despite other critical raves, the show has not exactly set the Taper box office afire, maybe due to the cast’s lack of star power (although Frank Wood, Annie Parisse and Christina Kirk are stage veterans). That means the producers will have their work cut out for them when the show opens at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 12.
The brouhaha did inspire plenty of media coverage (not to mention bitchy threads in theater chat rooms). In its details, it also mimicked an upcoming episode of “Smash,” the new NBC series about Broadway premiering on Monday. In a bid for what its creator playwright Theresa Rebeck calls “authenticity,” the series features cameos from a number of theater personalities playing themselves, including Roth and Riedel. In episode nine, Anjelica Huston, playing a hard-nosed Broadway producer, manipulates Riedel into printing a scathing column in the New York Post in order to bring a restive director back into line.
At this rate — following the firestorms over accidents at “Spider-Man” and Stephen Sondheim’s public broadsides against the creative team of the current revival of “The Gershwins’ ‘Porgy and Bess’” — Rebeck could hardly do worse than to do what “Law and Order” did so successfully: Develop stories ripped from the headlines.