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.