Clybourne Park wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama!

From the Playbill​.com Article:

Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, rec­og­nizing an out­standing stage work that pre­miered during the 2010 cal­endar year. The winner was announced 3 PM April 18 at Columbia University.

The play, according to the Pulitzer com­mittee, is described as a “pow­erful work whose mem­o­rable char­acters speak in witty and per­ceptive ways to America’s some­times toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.”

Also nom­i­nated as finalists were the Broadway-bound Detroit by Lisa D’Amour, a “con­tem­porary tragi­comic play that depicts a slice of des­perate life in a declining inner-ring suburb where hope is in fore­closure”; and Lincoln Center Theater’s A Free Man of Color by John Guare, “an auda­cious play spread across a large his­torical canvas, dealing with serious sub­jects while retaining a playful intel­lectual buoyancy.”

Clybourne Park, Norris’ riff on A Raisin in the Sun that examined race rela­tions and the effects of modern gen­tri­fi­cation, opened at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons in February 2010. Directed by Pam MacKinnon, the pro­duction “begins in 1959 as a white family moves out,” according to press notes. “In Act Two, it’s 2009 and a white family moves in. In the inter­vening years, change over­takes a neigh­borhood, along with atti­tudes, inhab­i­tants and property values. Loosely inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, this pitch-black comedy from Mr. Norris takes on the specter of gen­tri­fi­cation in one of America’s most rec­og­nizable com­mu­nities — leaving no stone unturned in the process.”

Question of the Day: What play or musical won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama? I’ll give you a hint…The show wasn’t quite in the norm.