Deadline is reporting that a film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning play Clybourne Park has just signed an absolutely star-studded cast with Sarah Paulson, Anthony Mackie, Martin Freeman, and Uzo Aduba among the names announced.
Clybourne Park is a play by Bruce Norris which won him a Tony, Olivier, and Pulitzer. The play follows the residents of a Chicago suburb, once in 1959 and again in 2009. The 1959 set section of the story, focuses on a couple who plan to sell their house in the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park to a black family, with their white neighbors trying to talk the couple out of it. The 2009 set section of the story centers around the same house being for sale again, but now Clybourne Park is a black neighborhood that is beginning to gentrify. The play is a spin-off of Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun", which was adapted into a 1961 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, with the main characters from that play being the black family attempting to move into Clybourne Park in 1959.
Paulson is an Emmy-winning actress who is known for her work in films like 12 Years a Slave and The Post and series like American Horror Story. Mackie is a critically acclaimed actor known for his roles in the films Hurt Locker and 8 Mile, and he recently became the new Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Freeman has three BAFTAs and had iconic roles in The Hobbit trilogy and the BBC’s Sherlock. Freeman also appeared in the play’s original UK cast at the Royal Court Theatre. Aduba is the three-time Emmy-winning star, best known for playing Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren for the entire run of Orange is the New Black. They will be joined in the film by Love, Simon’s Nick Robinson, and Sound of Metal’s Hillary Baack.
The film will be directed by Pam MacKinnon, who is making her feature directorial debut. MacKinnon won a Tony for directing the 2012 revival of the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. She also was nominated for a Tony for directing the play in 2012.
Clybourne Park will be produced by Simon Friend and Kevin Loader. Both producers have a history of producing stage-to-screen adaptations. Friend produced the recent Academy Award winner The Father and Loader has produced such adaptations as The Lady in the Van and The History Boys.
About the original play and the story it tells, Friend said:
“It’s a most simple act that triggers a combustible furor of race, family and community. The kernel of this explosive cocktail – and one that makes this storytelling so poignant – is something familiar to us: a kind family struggling to overcome a tragedy, who are moving out to find new hope.”
Loader added to that with:
“It’s 1959, and the seeds of conflict are sown when a couple in an all-white suburb are selling to a Black family. And the conflict continues within the suburb’s newest generation, 50 years later, at the peak of the Obama administration in 2009, where everything is supposedly different, but nothing has changed.”
MacKinnon closed out the statements by saying:
“Ten years after Broadway and the Pulitzer Prize, Clybourne Park is even more relevant as an investigation of white liberal fragility and hopes deferred. I am thrilled by the thought of this stellar acting company, storming this house and neighbourhood, building two worlds: a laugh-out-loud comedy of bad manners set in 2009 and heartrending family tragedy of 1959.”
Clybourne Park is expected to begin shooting in the fall in both the UK and the U.S.