Theater review: "Clybourne Park"

When "The Pain and the Itch" opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2006, Bruce Norris shot onto my short list of playwrights who dare to disturb the placid chemistry of theatergoing with sparky, hilarious, delightfully unrepentant observations about life as we choose to know it.

"Clybourne Park," his second premiere at the same theater, shares that uncompromising confidence and a willingness to mess up the connecting dots between what we think we believe and how we behave. The setting is the bungalow in the white community where the black family of Lorraine Hansbury's "A Raisin in the Sun" is preparing to move in 1959. Only this time, we're concentrating on the white family that is moving out. The second act jumps 50 years to a meeting in the decaying house between black neighbors and the white couple planning to build a big new one with a koi pond.

It is a sly juxtaposition, ripe for tribal claims and narcissistic real estate lawyers and enough recriminations to feed a party. Director Pam MacKinnon, a specialist in sharp-edge scrapings, helps transform the seven fine actors into 14 very different characters-with extra help from the quietly phenomenal Frank Wood as men of quiet despondence and obtuse fury.

Missing this time, alas, is the density that bloodied deep and secret places in the earlier play. "Clybourne" is smart and tight and (except for beating up on a deaf woman for laughs) chooses targets - racism, gentrification, war guilt - that deserve Norris' wit and wrath. But the big subjects feel constrained into two tidy hours (padded with ethnic jokes), as if this were an outline waiting for its audacious creator to blow apart with the messiness of truth.

'Measure for measure'

Having missed last year's wildly celebrated "Othello," directed by Arin Arbus for Theatre for a New Audience, I rushed to her "Measure for Measure" with perhaps outsize anticipation. In fact, the modern-dress production is straightforward, with Jefferson Mays ("I Am My Own Wife") as an unusually likable Duke and Rocco Sisto as an appropriately sinister Angelo, but little urgency or innovation that might make this intrinsically unpleasant tragic-comedy feel essential.