Absence Of Community Morality In Bruce Norris' S Clybourne Park

Bruce Norris(1960-) is a Pulitzer-winning American playwright known for social criticism in his works. Clybourne Park(2011), winner of Pulitzer Prize(2011) for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play(2012), is one of them, disclosing the difficulties of racial integration and the cohesion of community threatened by bigotry and indifference. Named after a fictional Chicago neighborhood first appearing in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun(1959), the play imagines new testing grounds for racial tensions and beyond by setting it in 1959 and 2009 in the same neighborhood.This thesis explores the absence of community morality in the play with members of the neighborhood reluctant to trust, support and understand each other. It argues that the Clybourne Park neighborhood in both 1959 and 2009 fails to become what Daniel Bell calls a “psychological community” wherein members experience psychological sense of togetherness and act on behalf of the good of community. The impossibility of such a “psychological community” in 1959 finds expression in the white-dominant members' indifference to the suicide of the Korean War veteran Kenneth and their reluctance to accept black Americans in their neighborhood. Arguably, the status quo is hardly changed half a century later when Clybourne Park neighborhood becomes a black-dominant community. Lack of understanding and support between neighbors remains profound as members continue to put their own interests before the good of the community. Norris seems to use Clybourne Park neighborhood as a metaphor for the American community to showcase tardy progress of American morality in spite of rapid social progress and improved racial tolerance in the post-racial era. In so doing, Norris confronts the moral crisis of American community when members can hardly allow genuine communication to guarantee mutual trust, support and understanding.