What: Palmer Park

Where: Studio Theatre, Stratford

When: Now through Sept. 21 (in repertory)

Tickets: 1-800-567-1600

There's little doubt it's time Stratford paid attention to Canadian-born playwright Joanna McClelland Glass.

She has been nominated for a Tony Award on Broadway for her corrosive and revealing drama, Play Memory. She has had brilliant success in the U.S. and Canada with Trying, her 2004 autobiographical two-hander about Judge Francis Biddle, the 81-year-old reprobate who was attorney general to Franklin Roosevelt, and his frightened young secretary, Sarah Joanna Glass. Earlier family comedies such as To Grandmother's House We Go, starring the legendary Eva Le Gallienne, made important waves.

Yet here she is largely ignored by what we have come to think of as Canada's National Theatre.

Well, Palmer Park opened a week or so ago in the Studio at Stratford. It is one of Glass's brilliant plays, an earnest and sincere attempt to deal with a part of her life she still finds troubling.

A model of racial integration in 1960s Detroit, the Palmer Park housing development offered hope for a harmonious future. Sadly, it failed.

Glass lived in Palmer Park as a young married mother. She experienced the difficulties of race riots and lack of humanity. She fought for important funding for local schools. And she found her sense of idealism dying.

That's mostly what Palmer Park is about -- the death of idealism. Living through the hippie era, the songs of hope and change, the sense of a fire in the belly, Glass looks back with sad understanding of just how much the image of Camelot died with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the death of Kennedy and the sad truth of communities such as Palmer Park.

White and black neighbours in this white-collar Detroit housing development struggle to keep their neighbourhood 65 per cent white and 35 per cent black. That way they can count on better school funding and attention being paid to their difficulties.

You could substitute a number of choices for black and white here and still come up with the same difficulties about class struggle.

Two upper-middle-class families -- one white, one black -- each struggle with reality. When 130 black kids of lower social status are getting transferred into Hampton Heights, the Palmer Park school, both whites and blacks of the area get up in arms.

Nasty things get said. Dreams die. People move out.

Set against footage of the 1967 Detroit race riots and hopeful harmonies of musicals such as Hair and songs by artists such as Mama Cass, this is a polemic, not a play.

The people of Palmer Park didn't so much want integration as privilege. Of course, it's easy to sympathize with their desire for a kind of integrated utopia. The thing is, they were all buying into houses that were elegant yet cheap. Why? Because the neighbourhood was no longer a white haven.

"When the first blacks move in, the last whites will move away within five years," one of Glass's characters says.

Glass is a clever playwright but she hasn't really managed to make her characters truly believable. Part of the reason is the backward look they are all taking. They're not living the moment, they're commenting on it from hindsight. They keep coming out of the play to talk to us directly.

Everything is acted at fever pitch. It's all so urgent. Director Ron O.J. Parson is so caught up in Glass's fomenting drama, he allows the characters to adopt annoying, self-righteous tones.

For all that, the acting is decent enough, with Dan Chameroy and Kelli Fox as a liberal white couple and Yanna McIntosh and Nigel Shawn Williams as a liberal black one.

Palmer Park may be meant as a lament for a lost ideal, but too often it seems too specific to a single event. When it comes to plays about lost idealism in America, Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children is a great deal more encompassing and caring.

It's nice to have Joanna McClelland Glass at Stratford, but she has written much better plays.

Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 25 years.