Clybourne Park (2010)

Anyone remotely offended by foul language, off-color jokes, and racial stereotypes should steer clear of Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, now receiving its world premiere at Off Broadway's Playwrights Horizons. But those thin-skinned theatergoers would be missing an absolute corker — a completely audacious, architecturally ingenious entertainment.

Norris begins his decades-jumping drama in 1959 at 406 Clybourne Street, a cozy, oak-paneled, brick-fireplaced bungalow in a white, middle-class enclave of suburban Chicago. Fussbudget Bev (Christina Kirk) and her withdrawn husband, Russ (Side Man Tony winner Frank Wood), have sold their house. And the buyers are…''a colored family.'' This newsflash comes courtesy of self-appointed community color guard Karl Lindner (Jeremy Shamos, wonderfully smarmy), who preaches progressiveness but is really just pissed about potentially plummeting property values. (Asks Bev: ''But isn't it possible that they're, I don't know, Mediterranean, or--?'') But Karl has just come from the ''unsavory'' neighborhood where the ''Negroes'' currently reside — where, considerately, he left his deaf, very pregnant wife (Annie Parisse) in the car — on an unsuccessful bid to encourage (i.e., pay) the family to stay put. (If the set-up sounds familiar it should. Lindner was the name of the white man who pulled that very stunt on the Youngers in Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. So in Norris' mind, this is the house the Youngers bought.) Pity Bev and Russ' maid, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), and her husband, Albert (Damon Gupton), who stumble into this fracas and are forced to face Karl's insipid queries about their skiing habits and whether the grocers' carry their ''preferred food items.'' Deadpans Albert: ''Do they carry collards and pig feet? 'Cuz I sho couldn't shop nowhere didn' sell no pig feet.'' Well, no one on stage realizes Albert is attempting a joke, and not surprisingly, it all goes downhill from there.

But in Act 2, set in 2009, it's the neighborhood that has gone downhill. 406 Clybourne has been pretty much gutted — wood floors replaced by linoleum, fireplace closed up bars cover the windows, and graffiti streaks the walls. Now, the neighborhood is predominantly black, and a white family is moving in: Steve (Shamos) and his very pregnant wife Lindsey (Parisse) have fallen ''in love'' with the up-and-coming area — it must be up-and-coming if there's a Whole Foods — and plan to transform 406 Clybourne into their liberal dream house, koi pond and all. But first, they need to get past the local Landmarks Committee and the protective community board, which includes Kevin (Gupton) and his very prickly wife, Lena (Dickinson). Is she objecting to Steve and Lindsey's renovations, or to their white faces? Steve thinks it's the latter, and despite Lindsey's assurance that ''Half of my friends are black,'' the scene swiftly devolves into an absurd vaudeville parody: Steve breaks out his joke about a ''little white guy'' and ''big black man'' in jail; Kevin tries to get a rise out of the room with ''How many white men does it take to change a light bulb?''; and Lena brings everything to a screeching halt by asking ''Why is a white woman like a tampon?'' (Norris' dialogue is a never-ending stream of un-PC, did-he-really-just-say-that? jaw-droppers.)

It's not just Norris' nerviness that makes Clybourne Park such an achievement. Putting the issue of race front and center and injecting the dialogue with a hefty dose of profanity does not necessarily a good play make. (For proof, see David Mamet's toothless Race. Better yet, don't.) It's Norris' inventive, even obsessive, attention to detail that really connects. Everyone in Act 2 has a connection to someone in Act 1. Sometimes it's ancestral (Lena's great aunt was the one who bought the house); sometimes it's simply dramaturgical (the karmic double casting of Shamos, first as the closed-minded insider trying to protect the lily-white sanctity of his streets, then as the opportunistic outsider trying to get a piece of rundown but desirable real estate in an economically depressed but soon-to-be-thriving community). Even the characters' backstories share details. Just as Francine and Albert have three children, so do Kevin and Lena. Conversations follow similar patterns: A completely irrelevant post-intermission debate over the capital of Morocco echoes the opening-scene dissertation about the origin of the word Neapolitan.

But Norris has one more trick up his proverbial sleeve — and it's stuffed in a back-breakingly heavy foot locker. We won't reveal its contents — Bev and Russ buried it in the backyard for a reason — but there's only one thing that could be so weighty: family secrets. Because as much fun as it may be telling a priest to ''go f--- yourself,'' nothing is more entertaining than unloading a trunk of embarrassing, painful memories in front of a room full of strangers. A

(Tickets: ticketcentral.com or 212-279-4200)

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