A Raisin in the Sun has a special place in Broadway history. It was, among other things, the first Broadway play with a black director and one of the first plays about black life to attract a large white audience. Those who criticized Sydney Poitier for playing so many unthreatening Good Negroes sometimes cite his performance in Raisin as an example par excellence of the form; those same critics apparently forget that his first role on Broadway was in Lysistrata. One of Lorraine Hansberry’s great achievements in the play is that she transformed a rather tedious real-life family drama starring her real-estate broker father—the legal proceedings of Hansberry v. Lee, a case dealing with racial covenants in housing—into a work of involving drama, and one that has borne fruit in the form of Clybourne Park, a wry take on the events leading up to the fictitious Younger family’s experience in Raisin and related events that come a generation later.

Clybourne Parkis a play by Bruce Norris with two acts and one joke, an elegantly simple structure that manages to be full of power and humor. The first act is set in 1959, when a white family, shattered by a terrible personal tragedy, sells its home in Clybourne Park, a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, at a discount price. Immersed in their own misery, they are unaware that the buyer is a black family—the first ever to move into the all-white enclave. The neighbors are more