A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Lorraine Hansberry

A Raisin in the Sun was first produced at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in New York on March 11, 1959. It was an overnight success and went on to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the year. The original cast included Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee, and his spectacular performance in this play added success on Broadway to an already remarkable career as an actor.

The play is also remarkarble in that it is a "first play" by a hitherto unknown playwright -- Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry grew up in a middle class family in Chicago. Her father was a real estate broker and his successful business allowed Lorraine to pursue an education and a career, no mean feat for a black woman in the 1950's. She attended many colleges and eventually found her way to New York where she began writing dramatic pieces and sharing them with her friends. A Raisin in the Sun took shape in Hansberry's living room. Raising and borrowing money in the black theater community of New York, young director Lloyd Richards and Poitier managed to get the play produced. At 29 years of age, Hansberry was one of the most promising young paywright of her generation, black or white.

In life as in drama, tragedy strikes. Hansberry developed cancer and died in 1965 at the age of 35. She wrote two more plays: The Sign in Sidney Burnstein's Window and Les Blancs. Neither was commercially successful but her loss to the theater was incalculable. Had she lived she would have written many great plays.

The title of the play is from a poem by Langston Hughes:

HARLEM - A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore --
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syurpy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The poem obviously suggests the inevitability of violence if racial oppression is allowed to continue and A Raisin in the Sun debuts just at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement of the 60's when in Montgomery, Detroit, Los Angeles and many other cities, racial tensions would indeed explode into violence. Although the play clearly pre-dates the Civil Rights movement in language, tone and staging, it nonetheless addresses the major issues of racial equality and economoic freedom that were to take center stage in America for the next decade.

The play also addresses one the most important themes in American Drama and Literature -- the allure of the American Dream. Does the dream condemn us to mindless materialism or make the "pursuit of happiness" possible for both black and white Americans. Hansberry deftly contrasts dignity /freedom with economic success and asks if both are achieveable or must the pursuit of one cancel out the other.

Moreover, as in much African American Literature, Hansberry develops the the theme of Self-Identity through all of the characters. Should Blacks in America embrace their "roots" or deny them? When Moma is introduced to Asagai from Africa, Moma says, "I don't know no Africans."

Finally, Hansberry shows her genius in also anticipating the gender conflicts of today. Much of Walter's un-doing early on can be atrributed to his male chauvinism and his need to dominate the women in the household. Hansberry deftly links together the sexual power struggles with the racial ones. Isn't oppression the same where ever it occurs?

 As for form, the play is a marvelous example of domestic REALISM.

Enjoy the show!

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