There Goes the Neighborhood

In all forms of narrative art, highbrow or lowbrow, we love sequels. Visit any multiplex and half the movies may be part of what the trade calls "franchises." But these are generally the easiest kind of sequel: products of the same creative team with most of the same elements. Even if set chronologically after the first work, they essentially revisit its world. Holmes and Watson, the Hardy Boys, Rocky, and the James Bond novels come from this world (though an intelligent disagreement is possible about the Bond of the movies). The audience for this kind of sequel generally seeks and generally gets repetition of whatever appealed to them the first time round.

Sequels that truly advance the story are a step up from this. Think of the Shakespeare history plays, or some of the most intelligent television series. More challenging still are sequels that reimagine the initial work, build around it and in some sense subvert it. The two works combined in the Roman de la Rose (one an allegory of courtly love, the other a blowing up of the mystique of courtly love) are of this type. Wordsworth's bathetic narrative poem Peter Bell provoked Peter Bell parodies by other hands (it was easy to poke fun at), and one, by Shelley, a reply in satirical form that was at the same time a bit of a takeoff from the original. Pamela and Shamela would be another example. From a strictly narrative standpoint, the second of the Back to the Future movies deconstructed much of the plot of the first, and I think qualifies as the same kind of feat.

Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park, which I wrote about in these pages last year, was a stunt of this more advanced type. Visiting "another part of the forest," the fictional Chicago-area neighborhood of Clybourne Park, to which the Younger family of A Raisin in the Sun was preparing to move, it purported to show what was happening there at exactly the same time as the center city action of Raisin—and then leapt forward half a century. Raisin (1959) was an encyclopedic exploration of black concerns in its era; Clybourne Park (Off-Broadway 2010, Broadway 2012), audaciously covered an enormous amount of territory in the ongoing and probably endless national dialogue about race. It has been widely acclaimed—winning the Tony, the Pulitzer, and the Olivier awards—and justly so. However, there can be no denying it is in some ways subversive of Hansberry's views. And, though hilariously even-handed in some ways, it was definitely a white take on many of the issues Hansberry opened up from a black perspective.

This whiteness of Norris's take (and no doubt the commercial hope of riding the coattails of Clybourne Park as, newly released from the exclusivity of Broadway, it makes the circuit of regional theater throughout the country) has provoked playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, a Briton of Grenadan and ultimately Ghanian heritage, now artistic director at Centerstage, Baltimore's foremost Equity company, to try his own hand at a Raisin sequel. Earlier this year, Centerstage premiered Kwei-Armah's own entry in the Raisin sequel sweepstakes, Beneatha's Place, in repertory with Baltimore's first revival of Clybourne Park, packaging the two together as The Raisin Cycle. This artistic "twofer" was well covered in the national press, and is the subject of an upcoming hour-long special on PBS. Centerstage, which never does a play other than impeccably, of course served up these two plays in customary style, with a great cast (singular, as we shall see) and great direction by Derrick Saunder (a protégé of August Wilson). So this was An Event.

As theatrical events go, it was admittedly oddly shaped: two sequels without the original seminal work. But Beneatha's Place is, no doubt by design, written to be performed by nearly the same-sized cast as Clybourne Park (one additional actress is required), and the cast (with that addition) required has the same racial breakdown (these being plays in which racially unconventional casting would be a non-starter). The racial breakdown...