Watching a play about race, gentrification, and community set in a fictional South Chicago neighborhood in 1959 (Act 1) and 2009 (Act 2) while living through 2025 feels a little quaint. It’s kind of like how I feel when Facebook Memories reminds me around election night every year that once Mitt Romney’s potential ascension to the nation’s highest seat inspired me to post that I might need to leave the country: While in 2012 Romney’s anti-immigration stance tracked hard right and his secretly recorded “47 percent” comment was revolting, both seem tepid compared to the overt racism and elitism the current executive office proudly spews.
That is not to say Clybourne Park, which just wrapped up a run at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities in Arvada, Colorado, evokes nostalgia. It could be described as two acts of yelling matches that include racist and homophobic jokes, homophobic and xenophobic slurs, and a cornucopia of cringey moments that draw a clear bead on not just how important it is to bring these issues into the open and discuss them, but how insidious and deeply woven they are into American society.
Clybourne Park is a Pulitzer– and Tony–winning play, and plenty of the dialogue is bitingly funny; whole-audience groans were especially abundant in Act 2. It’s based loosely on Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, which focuses mostly on a Black family that buys a house in fictional Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood. A representative from the neighborhood association offers the family money not to move into their new home.
Clybourne Park is set in the same fictional Chicago neighborhood, only instead of telling the story of the Black family moving in, it focuses on the white couple preparing to sell their house to a Black family. In this play, the same representative warns that if Black people are allowed to move in, home prices will tank. “First one family will leave, and then another, and another,” he warns. “And each time they do, the values will decline.” Act 1 addresses more than just racism; it also highlights ableism, misogyny, the misogynoir directed at Black women, and even the stigma around suicide.
In Act 2 the scene fast-forwards to 2009. The same house is now part of a predominantly Black neighborhood. It is once again up for sale and at the center of a different yet eerily familiar debate. This time, a white couple intends to buy and renovate it, sparking discussions about gentrification, historic preservation, and who has the right to define a community’s current and future makeup and culture.
Show director Kenny Moten, who’s co-president of the Denver Actors Fund, wrote in his director’s note of his experience leading the production that, “as a Black man, directing this play allows me to bring my perspective and lived experience to the story. I’ve felt the weight of many of these dynamics and have seen how spaces—both physical and emotional—are shaped by power, privilege, and exclusion.” Moten feels the stories in Clybourne Park feel “especially relevant today, in a time when people seem more disconnected than ever . . . It challenges us to reflect on how we contribute to the very divisions we claim to want to overcome.”
This showing of Clybourne Park began its run in mid-February and ran through the end of March. The show on Sunday, March 23, included a housing-focused panel discussion after the performance. Brian Rossbert, executive director of Housing Colorado, a statewide affordable housing advocacy nonprofit, moderated the panel, which also featured savinay nathan, community impact vice president at Colorado Gives Foundation; Amy Case-Miranda, deputy chief executive officer at Foothills Regional Housing (FRH), the county’s housing authority; and Melissa Mejía, a community activist.
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Case-Miranda’s organization administers the local Housing Choice Voucher program—which sets low-income recipients’ rents at 30 percent of their income and is one of dozens of federally funded assistance programs facing potentially deep cuts under the current administration. She feels that the complex challenges explored in Clybourne Park are especially relevant in today’s political and cultural climate. FRH was established nearly 50 years ago. The organization currently owns and operates 25 affordable housing communities in Jefferson County and has several developments underway. Case-Miranda’s organization has struggled to keep up with the growing demand for affordable units as need increases. Many of FRH’s clients face a plethora of economic pressures, from health care to groceries to child care to transportation, creating a complex set of problems for the community. “It will take an intensely collaborative approach to address them,” Case-Miranda says, adding that “these types of conversations are critical to inspiring needed dialogue.”
Like most places, Arvada—a northwest Denver suburb of about 120,000 residents where the median home price is $612,500—is deep in a housing shortage and affordability crisis. The two dozen or so audience members who stayed for the discussion peppered panelists with hyperlocal questions about ways to increase supply and create housing affordable to essential workers. Echoing the gentrification theme from the play, the audience also expressed concern that new construction could push out existing lower-income residents, which Colorado Gives Foundation’s nathan says is just the type of conversations locals need to be having.
“Whenever you can take a show or art and engage the audience in a way that gets them thinking and leaving the theater curious about what they saw and what it could mean for their community, I think you’re achieving what art was originally intended to do,” nathan says. “Also, kudos for taking a risk to spark a conversation about the show and creating a safe space for our community to tackle these tough issues.
“These conversations are not easy. The topics are difficult to perform, watch, and talk about, but they’re crucial for pushing the conversation forward and driving meaningful change.”
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