THE CLYBOURNE IDENTITY
Published in the November 15, 2025 issue.
Shira Dubrovner, Artistic Director of the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theater, invited me to watch one of the last dress rehearsals of her most recent play, “Clybourne Park” on Wednesday night. Armed with my notepad, pen, and brilliant friend Gracie, I watched in awe for two hours as local actors portrayed complex race dynamics.
The play takes place in a Chicago two-bedroom home, over a period of 50 years, and deals with the historical issue of white flight and the contemporary dilemma of gentrification.
In the first act, the play is stiff and awkward. I wondered if this was due to the uncomfortable subject matter. The play opens with a particularly compelling Russ (Clay Tyson), sitting in his pajamas, listening to jazz on the radio and eating an entire carton of neapolitan ice cream. It’s 1959 at 4 p.m.
Russ’s painfully well-meaning, floral dress-clad wife, Bev (Marlene Piper) walks down the stairs to join him. Bev is worried about Russ. She fears he has leaned too far into grieving their dead son Kenneth (Cam Angwin), who committed suicide in the house two years before. Bev invites Pastor Jim (Kenneth Aedwyrd Needham) over to comfort her husband. Russ tells the Pastor to go f*ck himself.
White couple Russ and Bev are moving. All of their things are packed in boxes strewn across the floor. The yellow walls have been stripped of photographs, leaving behind grimy rectangular outlines. Their quiet Black maid Francine (Sarah Brown) is helping Bev move when neighbor Karl (Micheal Neal Johnson, an actor from LA) calls with some alarming news. The family who bought the house is Black.
The actors found their stride once their characters’ emotions started to fly. Karl brings his deaf and pregnant wife, Betsy (Gretchen Seibert, whom the other characters engage with via disheartening attempts at sign language) over to the house and a yelling match ensues. Karl is irate.
“They eat different food!” Karl shouts. Then he brings Francine and her husband Albert (Ronnell Hill) into the room, and asks them how they would feel if a bunch of white people moved into their neighborhood.
“Maybe that would be good for you guys actually,” Karl says.
Francine turns to her husband Albert and says, “These people are all crazy.”
The second act of the play is set in 2009, at 4 p.m., in the same room of the now dilapidated house on Clybourne Street. A white couple, Lindsey and Steve (played by Johnson and Siebert), are tearing the house down.
They plan to rebuild it to be 15 feet taller, violating historical building codes.
They’re the first white people in 50 years to move into the geographically desirable neighborhood. A Black woman, Lena (Brown, again), backed by her husband, Kevin (Hill returns), raises her concerns. Every so often Dan (Tyson), a handy-man wearing his hat backwards and a greasy “Guns and Roses” t-shirt, comes in to ask about installing a koi pond in the backyard.
In this act, the play beautifully highlights generational history. Lena’s great aunt and her namesake had been a little girl when her family moved into the house, and Kathy (Marlene Piper), a lawyer Steve and Lindsey had hired, was the child of pregnant Betsy in the first act. Through the characters exchanging these details about their own families, the audience learns that the white families occupying the neighborhood fled when the first Black family moved in.
What transpires over the course of the much stronger second act is a nail-biting, excruciating discussion of race and gentrification. It’s a conversation that is applicable today. Siebert is dressed in a flowing white shirt and her and her husband are both liberal. But when her husband tells a racist joke, Lindsey exclaims, “half my friends are Black!” Steve then asks her to list them.
The strength of “Clybourne Park” lies in its dialogue. Because the play takes place in one room, in one house, the tensions exist in the conversation. This requires a lot of heavy lifting from the actors, who must make all this talking feel natural and real.
“It was hard to memorize all the lines,” Dubrovner told the Sheet on Wednesday. “We had two less weeks than I wish we did.”
The stars of the show were Johnson, and Tyson, who has been acting in Mammoth since 2012. Hill, also an experienced actor, had moments of brilliance, like when he raised one eyebrow and said, “we a couple of crackheads ourselves.” On the flip side, it was Brown’s first time acting, and sometimes, her voice was lost.
Dubrovner is taking a risk with this play. She’s a white woman directing a play written by a white man, Bruce Norris, about race. I initially questioned these ethics, but my friend Gracie posed a different perspective. Art is supposed to make us think. It is supposed to make us feel uncomfortable. In an era of woke-ism on the left and Trumpism on the right, “Clybourne Park” forces the audience to confront their own conceptions of race. By bringing the play to Mammoth Lakes, Dubrovner opens the conversation in our backyard. It’s a risk worth taking.
“Clybourne Park” will run for the next two weekends.
