My friend Jennifer Mendenhall has spent her entire professional acting career in D.C. after graduating from UVa. She hasn’t been lured away by film and television. Rather, she prefers to work in theater and has graced most of Washington’s professional stages. She’s deeply entrenched in the Washington theater scene, and has been recognized with the Washington Theatre Lobby Award and has won the Helen Hayes Award, while having been nominated 12 additional times.

She is a company member at Woolly Mammoth Theater Co., and they have remounted their production of "Clybourne Park," the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and Laurence Olivier Award winning play penned by Bruce Morris, in answer to Lorraine Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun". I was thrilled to hear they remounted the piece, as I missed it during last year’s run. The play, timely and classic, has sold out every performance of the run.

I was especially interested in seeing the play, as it had been slated for Charlottesville theater Live Arts’ 2010 program schedule, and the former Artistic Director wanted me to read for it. Unfortunately, there was a staffing shake-up at Live Arts and rather than hire another director for the compelling piece, they dropped it from the season entirely.

It’s a pity, because it’s an absolutely riveting, riotous and very relevant piece of contemporary American drama. The political play, set in the 50’s in the first act and then coming full circle present day in the second, is rife with throwbacks to Archie Bunker. Norris bites with the same efficiency, wit and scalding as Norman Lear. As we experience the gap between the have and have-nots growing ever wider, the issues of market values, gentrification and what makes a place “home”, are on the lips of us all. In this time of deep economic uncertainty, many are forced to scale back, or alter entirely, their idea of the American Dream.

Charlottesville’s ever-evolving community, and mostly progressive audiences, would certainly be able to relate to and empathize with the territorial dynamic illustrated so fluently by Morris and his play. After all, the lower-income housing, aka the projects, were built smack-dab in the heart of downtown. While there may be room for greater sensitivity, this isn’t a white-bred community insistent on ignoring social divides, and it was cheated out of a truly powerful theater-going experience in losing "Clybourne Park" to what many viewed as politics.

Ah, the irony of it all. In order to survive and grow, individuals, communities and nations must think more critically about their choices and how they impact the world at large. Gone are the days of living in a bubble, and nothing underscores that more than the shared experience of a play that forces you to examine yourself in the refracted light of the stage.