Image from the Arlington Players.

In 2011, we organized a group outing to see Clybourne Park, the award-winning play about gentrification in Chicago, at the Woolly Mammoth. Come see it with us again next month in Arlington!

The Arlington Players will stage the show for its local community theater debut Sunday, February 9 at 2:30 pm at the Thomas Jefferson Community Theatre in Arlington. Then, we’ll have an open discussion with the director, cast, and some of your favorite GGW contributors.

The play opens in 1959, in Chicago’s Clybourne Park neighborhood, the same time and place depicted in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, before jumping to the present. It weaves themes of race and gentrification with dialogue on zoning and commute times.

A white family is moving out, and one of their neighbors is concerned because they sold the house to what the neighborhood’s first African-American family. 50 years later, the neighborhood is almost exclusively black, and now a young white couple has bought the house and plans to replace it with a McMansion. Not surprisingly, the characters show no comfort in addressing the big issues that lay before them, preferring to dance around them as much as possible.

The theater’s located at 125 S. Old Glebe Road, a little over a mile from both the Ballston and Virginia Square Metro stations. It’s also accessible by Metrobus routes 10B, 23A, 23C, and 4A as well as ART route 41. You can purchase tickets here. And if you can’t make our outing, you can still catch the play between January 31 and February 15 at 8:00 pm on Friday and Saturday nights and on Sunday afternoons at 2:30 pm.

Steven Yates grew up in Indiana before moving to DC in 2002 to attend college at American University.  He currently lives in Southwest DC.

One of GGWash's early contributors and editors, Jaime is currently assistant director of planning for the City of Greenbelt, MD. Over the years and across the country, Jaime's work on transportation and the built environment has focused on the critical intersection of health equity and planning. She lives in Trinidad, DC.