BY CHARLES MCNULTY, LA Times Can a drama be memorable if all its characters are disagreeable? Bruce Norris proves that it’s possible in “Clybourne Park,” his smart, abrasively funny and fiendishly provocative play that opened Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum. This superb production, which premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2010, is headed to Broadway after its Los Angeles run. And the precision with which the cast members, under the expert direction of Pam MacKinnon, shape their multiple roles goes a long way toward making this biting satiric comedy about racial discord and communal disingenuousness as damnably enjoyable as it is. The play, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize f
BY BOB VARINI, Variety Remember the pan across the appalled, slackjawed audience in the original movie "The Producers," at the end of "Springtime for Hitler"? The cast of Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" would surely see Taper spectators' faces registering similar horror eight times a week, were they not so focused behind the fourth wall on bringing to life the Pulitzer Prize winning, coruscating exploration of how we talk and think about race in America. Yes, it's dangerous and provocative, but pulverizingly funny to boot. Norris' jazz riff on themes within pioneering 1959 drama "A Raisin in the Sun" requires no prior familiarity with Lorraine Hansberry's classic (although Center Theater Grou
BY TANNER STRANSKY, Entertainment Weekly Nary a detail was changed in the NYC-to-L.A. transfer of Bruce Norris' lightning rod of a play, Clybourne Park, which is running at the Mark Taper Forum through Feb. 26. Everything's the same as it was during the Pulitzer Prize-winning outing in the Big Apple, from the cast down to the graffiti on the walls of 406 Clybourne Street in the show's second act. That's all good news: It's still the same racially charged, brilliantly acted, clever show as it was before. So it should come as no surprise that the production is just as good as when EW's Melissa Rose Bernardo gave it a sterling A two years ago. She called Clybourne ''an absolute corker — a compl
