Daily Herald - Highly Recommended
"...Redtwist's production benefits from the intimate staging, which compels audience members to examine their own attitudes, particularly in the second act when Norris exposes the insidious prejudice that lingers in a generation of Americans who ought to know better."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...Steve Scott's fraught and funny production benefits from tense performances and close quarters at Redtwist Theatre's tiny storefront space. Pat Whalen is especially strong as a nerdy bigot in act one and a tightly wound yuppie in act two."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Steve Scott stages the production in the round, creating an incredibly voyeuristic experience inside the compact Redtwist space. The awkwardness is amplified by the audience's close proximity to the actors (who are at times mere inches away), and the performances are perfectly modulated for the surroundings. Playing a housemaid in the past and a member of the Clybourne Park historical preservation society in the present, Kelly Owens conveys much of her characters' frustrations and anxieties with a raised eyebrow or a pursed lip, exhibiting visible signs of discomfort that herald a forthcoming tirade."
Chicago On the Aisle - Highly Recommended
"...Picking up where Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" leaves off, Norris' play - set in the fictional, all-white Chicago neighborhood of Clybourne Park - opens in 1959 with the first sale of a home to a black family and the community's frantic resistance. The play's second part, 50 years later, finds a young white couple about to take over the same house in what is now a black neighborhood, but with the intention of tearing it down and building something larger - to the chagrin of a young black couple who wish to preserve the traditional look and feel of their community."
Let's Play at ChicagoNow - Highly Recommended
"...The first act of Clybourne Park, which makes its Chicago storefront debut at Redtwist in a bracing production helmed by Steve Scott, is set in this same late 1950s time period and location just prior to the events of A Raisin the Sun. The play opens with a middle-aged white couple and their African-American domestic boxing up their household before leaving their South Side home in favor of the suburbs. They seem to be less booking a white flight out of town then cutting the cord to a community that turned its back on them after a family tragedy."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"... This has been a pretty exciting year for some of our smaller theater companies- many doing things they have never done before and some taking larger productions and shrinking them in size to fit their venues, while never giving up any portion of the story or settling for lesser talents than the larger theaters used. Chicago is the “greatest” theater city because of this. redtwist theatre, that little black box that does red-hot drama with a little red twist located on Bryn Mawr Avenue on the North Side is now doing the Pulitzer Prize winning ”Clybourne Park” written by Bruce Norris. It is the follow-up story that Lorraine Hansbury never wrote after “A Raisin In The Sun” ( now playing at Timeline Theatre in Chicago). While that is a story about an African American family , living in a Ghetto, who due to an insurance settlement can move into a housing development where they would be the first Black family, this goes much further."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"..."Clybourne Park" is a difficult play to summarize because Norris tackles so many themes not only simultaneously, but cleanly and sympathetically. Along with the consistent themes across the two acts - race relations, economic divides, business opportunities - you also have a shrewd document of two eras in America, with the play jumping from the modest 1950s, a time when decency and politeness obscured even the most hateful of emotions, and the present day, a time of smartphones, short attention pans, and even shorter tempers."
