Features Published 21 April 2016

Bruce Norris: “Theatre is a luxury product generally consumed by the privileged.”

The author of Clybourne Park talks to Kate Wyver about race, gentrification, and the power of theatre to take the piss out of privilege.
Kate Wyver
bruce norris

Bruce Norris. Photo by Clara Molden.

In all of the interviews I read with Bruce Norris, I am struck by his mixture of pessimism, wit and sass. He is notably downbeat about most things, making the idea of interviewing him rather daunting, particularly when I find out he is in a vineyard in Massachusetts and does not own a mobile, therefore I need to email over the questions. This concept feels alien in the world of phone or Skype interviews. Thankfully all of the above traits translate across oceans and wifi. This summer his play Clybourne Park is going on tour in a production directed by Daniel Buckroyd. Clybourne Park is a spin-off from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and applies a modern outlook to race and housing, twisting our expectations and playing on our prejudices.

 You’ve said in the past that you love attention, so why did you stop acting? What drew you to playwriting?

Well, I love a particular type of attention, and I like to be the one defining the terms (I’m a bit of a fascist).  As an actor, someone else was always going to determine how I would be perceived or listened to and since my body has a particular shape and sound (that of a lightweight, harmless, weaselly white man) I was only going to ever be cast as feckless bureaucrats or ineffectual fathers, neither of which really agreed with my interior sense of myself.  So, as a playwright I get to channel all of my rage and spleen into other peoples’ mouths, which I find very satisfying. Plus, the hours are much better.

Do you aim to challenge, or attack, your audiences?

Attack is not a bad word for it – Clybourne Park, for example was aimed specifically at white people, taking a swing at people like me and all of our insincere etiquette around race.  I think the word I’d pick, if given the choice, would be disrupt.  I hope to disrupt what I perceive to be consensus.  Especially within my own community, at the dinner parties of us privileged white liberals consensus always makes me feel itchy and paranoid and I feel a deep urge to disrupt it, like wanting to make a fart noise in church or something.  It’s adolescent, maybe, but I try as much as possible to put the impulse to good use.

Do you think humour is important in testing boundaries and making a point? (In particular I’m referring to the scene of exchanged racist jokes in CP.)

A German journalist once asked me a similar question and I said I thought that humour was self-justifying.  I think it’s pleasing to laugh, and – for me, anyway – it’s most pleasing when it’s about the most intimate topics.  And there could hardly be a topic around which we are more excruciatingly sensitive now (in the US at least) than race.  I also think that humor – to go back to my previous answer – is disruptive, and sometimes you can find yourself laughing at ideas or positions that you would never entertain in a more somber context, and that laughter can shake up a smug consensus.

bruce norris

Clybourne Park at Mercury Theatre. Photo by Robert Day.

Do American and British audiences react very differently to your work?

Not really – I’ve had only two plays play both in the US and UK and, especially in the case of Clybourne Park, the response was almost identical.  The nice thing that happened is that when the play came to the Royal Court it was the largest house it had played to that date and it, as it turned out, the larger house made it especially enjoyable because the responses were more substantial.  But London audiences in particular certainly understand issues of race and gentrification so there was never any culture gap that I could perceive.

Do you think the UK has any more or less progressive racial attitudes to the US?

Well, maybe the question should be do you think you have a more progressive attitude?  Because I think people are pretty uniformly racist wherever you go – it takes differnt forms, according to the history of a place, but I think by and large most of us harbor unconscious, unexamined dark thoughts about each other, and I’m more interested in the psychology of how we – the unconscious racists – explain and justify ourselves.  We hear a lot of examination of how it feels to be the victim of racism, but we avoid talking about why we want to perpetuate it and what we gain by doing so.

How much artistic input have you had on this particular production of Clybourne Park? Have you seen it? Do you know what direction they’re taking it in?

Not too much – I’ve spoken with Daniel Buckroyd and he seems focussed on delivering a solid version of the story, so I don’t think he’s planning on taking it in any radical “direction”.  I’ve seen productions that have attempted that and frankly, they just leave the audience bewildered, so why bother?  I’ve also, by this point, seen so many incarnations that I’ve loosened some (but not all) of my white-knuckle control over the play.

The regional tour, if you don’t mind me saying, (and I know playwrights don’t choose the touring areas) is going to a lot of rather privileged places i.e. Oxford, Cambridge and Richmond. Do you think this play is made for the typical white middle class audience in order to make them question themselves and their prejudices?

Well, of course.  Theatre, for better or worse, is a luxury product generally consumed by the privileged.  We like to pretend that we’re playing to a working-class audience but that’s like claiming to make caviar for the poor.  Ticket buyers (especially in the US, because of the cost) tend to be educated, prosperous folks, predominantly white, and they’re inclined to hold a predictable set of respectable, bourgeois attitudes about their place in the world.  So it’s pleasing for me – being one of that community – to take the piss – as you would say – out of them.  Or, out of us, I should say.   So hopefully the play is like a little bonbon for them with a nasty flavor inside.

Clybourne Park is on at the Mercury Theatre Colchester, then touring. More information here

 

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