Large audiences are expected to turn out this weekend for the opening of Clybourne Park at 710 Main Theatre. A Road Less Traveled production, Clybourne Park was written by Bruce Norris an is directed by Scott Behrend.
"It's actually played all over the world already and was very successful on Broadway. This is the first local production of this play," Behrend said.
"I think it's extraordinarily funny."
Winner of a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize, Clybourne Park uses that humor as it explores the sensitive theme of housing discrimination.
Act One takes the audience back to 1959 as a white family sells its home to an African American family, setting off shock waves throughout the neighborhood. Act Two is set in 2009. The same home now is at the center of a neighborhood that is going through another set of changes.
Behrend believes the theme will hit home with many area residents.
"I lived on the border of Cheektowaga and the East Side of Buffalo for a number of years and that was a neighborhood in transition. My neighbors on one side did not like the neighbors two doors down from me because of the color of their skin. They were very open and talkative about it."
Road Less Traveled Productions is celebrating its tenth year with a special event. Pam MacKinnon, the Clarence native who won a Tony Award this year for her direction of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is coming to Buffalo for a fundraiser on Saturday, November 16. MacKinnon was also nominated for a Tony Award for her direction of Clybourne Park in 2010.
The Road Less Traveled production of Clybourne Park appears at 710 Main Theatre through December 1.