'Palmer Park' thoroughly researched but rarely riveting

There is a definite sense of noble worthiness to the subject matter of “Palmer Park,” the concluding play of Clockwise Theatre's first full subscription season in Waukegan. This 2008 work by Canadian-born playwright Joanna McClelland Glass (“Trying,” “Play Memory”) deals with racial integration and class divisions in a Detroit neighborhood starting in 1967.

Yet anyone hoping for an engrossing drama about urban integration along the lines of Bruce Norris' recent Pulitzer Prize-winning “Clybourne Park” is bound to be disappointed. That's largely a result of the jumbled structure Glass chose for her thoroughly researched “Palmer Park.”

Glass provides detailed narrated facts and figures for historical context, veering into brief so-so dramatic interludes that you wish would dig deeper and be more incisive. Her characters also frequently talk in grandstanding moralizing lectures, making them come off more as philosophical or sociological mouthpieces than fully rounded people.

That's not to say that there isn't anything for the company of 10 actors to play in “Palmer Park,” but they do seem stymied by the show's structure at creating empathetic characters the audience can identify with. That unfortunately keeps the play's events at a clinical distance, making it more educational than entertaining.

“Palmer Park” initially focuses on the neighborly friendship of the African-American Hazelton family and the white Townsends. Martin and Kate Townsend (Louis Arata and Cynthia Shur Petts) are natives of Iowa whose daughter relocated from the D.C. area to Detroit for a teaching position at Wayne State University. Fletcher Hazelton (Tharius Sumter) is a pediatrician, while his wife, Linda (Delicia Dunham), enjoys being a stay-at-home mother to their daughter.

Glass does offer up some interesting neighborly adjusting scenes for these four characters, but then the play's focus shifts to the battle to maintain Palmer Park's 65/35 percent balance of white and black residents. Tensions arise when parents from a less-advantaged and overcrowded neighboring school insist on having their kids bussed into Palmer Park schools. Rather than race, the battles switch to class and income divisions and how those will imperil this seemingly well-integrated neighborhood.

There's undeniably a lot of great raw historical material and situations for Glass to work with in “Palmer Park.” But she undermines herself by opting not to synthesize all these elements into a dramatic whole.

It seems director Doug McDade could have made the production speedier by lessening the numerous transitions between Glass' stop-and-start scenes with more careful coordination with lighting designer Jake Bray. McDade also doesn't help his actors to drop a certain hesitancy to their performances, though Glass' underwritten characters don't allow the acting company to fully shine.

There's no denying that Clockwise Theatre's “Palmer Park” is informative and full of insights on race relations in America in the late 1960s and early '70s. But there is a difference between dramas and documentaries, and “Palmer Park” comes off more like the latter to its theatrical detriment.