Playwright Joanna McClelland Glass refers to Palmer Park as a "Lament for a Lost Ideal," and it is a very personal lament as well as one with universal significance. The title of her Tony-nominated play from the 1980s, Play Memory, comes to mind because this is a memory play about a group of idealistic young Detroit parents in the 1960s who tried to combat the artificial integration of bussed school attendance and create instead a genuinely integrated community reflected in the diversity of its integrated public schools. For a time they succeeded, but eventually the pressure of needier black communities to share in their excellent educational opportunities brought about the very segregation they had hoped to defeat: the awful "real estate mantra" that "Integration is what occurs between the first black moving in and the last white moving out." From 1968 to 1974 in Detroit, the playwright's family actually was among that last group.
The result is a Stratford world premiere of a high-minded play about high-minded people, often imaginatively directed by Ron OJ Parson, and charismatically acted by gifted young actors. The design team, credited below, offer a flavorful recreation of the period and its spirit, including the ways in which ethnic variations in music and fashion become shared preferences. The two leading young couples, Fletcher and Linda Hazelton and Martin and Kate Townsend, superbly played by Nigel Shawn Williams and Yanna McIntosh, Dan Chameroy and Kelli Fox, respectively, win our sympathy and concern almost immediately. Fletcher is an established pediatrician in the community; Martin is a beginning physics professor; so the black couple display slightly more sophisticated tastes and expensive possessions. The six remaining actors listed below play multiple roles fairly flawlessly.
So we get to share in these experiences and feel the participants' disappointments. There is much worthy theatrical accomplishment here. But by the first intermission, I was beginning to wonder whether a quiz might follow the performance. And by the end of the play, for all its riches and emotional content, I couldn't shake the feeling that I should be handed a diploma.
Some of the didacticism is unavoidable, given the play's topic and thesis; but some of its earnest desire to inform and instruct needs to be toned down in favor of playing a drama.
