by Richard Lord
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 syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
— Langston Hughes
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. In fact, almost midway between the arrest of Rosa Parks with the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While Hansberry’s play doesn’t match those events in importance to the modern civil rights movement, it was a groundbreaking theatrical work and did make a significant cultural contribution to the movement.
In 1959, racial discrimination in housing was not only legal, it was an honored tradition in much of the United States – even in a “progressive” city such as Chicago. And Fifties Chicago with its skillfully segregated city design is where A Raisin In the Sun takes place.
The focus of the play is on the Youngers, a Black family in what they admit is a slum area of Chicago, where kids chase rats for play and different families have to rush to get to the bathroom first. Lena and her late husband have been living in this cheerless apartment for close to 40 years. The family lives paycheck to paycheck, and there are months when they find themselves having more month than money. But all that is about to change.
The family is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the mailman, who is bringing them a check of $10,000. (That $10,000 figure wouldn’t hoist eyebrows even a few centimeters today, but this is 1950s, and that’s the equivalent of just over $109,000 today.) With that kind of money, the members of the Younger family can start along a path of realizing some of their long cherished dreams. The problem – and one of the dramatic sparks of the play – is that the dreams of one person there undermines the dreams of another.
The three main characters with ideas about how that money can be used to achieve their dreams are Lena, the loving matriarch of the family; Walter, her 35-year-old son who currently works as a rich man’s chauffeur; and her daughter Beneatha, who is a college student with dreams of becoming a successful medical doctor. As the expected dosh is insurance money arranged by Lena’s late husband, Lena is the one who has to decide how the money is to be dispersed.
There has long been more than a tinge of sibling rivalry roiling between Walter and Beneatha, and the sudden infusion of wealth into that rivalry intensifies the competition between Lena’s two grown children.
There are a number of subplots carefully woven into Raisin’s narrative, but a significant parallel to the main plot comes about when Lena puts a large down payment on a pleasant house in Clybourne Park, an exclusively White neighborhood. A representative from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association soon appears. In his waffling way, this representative lets the family know they will not be welcome in that all-White enclave. When one brewing subplot takes a nasty turn, it flows into this pool of overt racism and gives the play a major surge of power.
Considered a classic of American theatre, A Raisin In the Sun has seen many revivals in both America and Britain, including a 2014 Broadway revival that took the Tony as Best Revival of A Play along with two other Tonys. Referring to the play in a 1983 article, the New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich wrote that Raisin “changed American theatre forever”.
If you want to know why the play is now considered a classic, all you need to do is catch the People’s Light production now running out in Malvern. This is a first-rate production that brings out all the power of the play, but also highlights its humor and the emotional fiber.
Director Steve H. Broadnax III has seen to it that all these elements are brought out in a riveting manner. Broadnax and his cast have put in a good value-added elements to their take. For instance, in the scene where Walter returns drunk and tells George Murchison that he would like to sit down with George’s father, the staging emphasizes how much George is trying his best to tolerate someone he considers little more than a drunken lout while Walter sees this as a way of unloading some of his pent-up frustration.
The cast is superlative; there’s not a weak component in any of the roles.
Candace Thomas takes on the role of Ruth, Walter’s wife and the one largely keeping things together in the household. In the script, Hansberry describes Ruth this way: “In a few years, … she will be known among her people as a settled woman.” “Settled woman” indicates a woman who, weighed down by repeated negative experiences and the pressures of daily life, has “given up any thoughts of a better future for herself.” Candace Thomas plays Ruth as a woman aware of this process having already begun and now trying to fight against becoming that “settled woman” with all the grim strengths she can still muster.
If you can, try to keep an eye on Thomas’ Ruth in those scenes in which she’s standing in the background or off to the side. In many of those moments, Ruth’s face is a gauge giving us important subtexts to what’s happening or what’s being said. This is what theatre people refer as ‘quiet power’, and Thomas clearly brings it to her performance.
Morgan Charése Hall portrays Beneatha in one of this production’s most compelling performances. In the early going, Hall endows Beneatha with a charming playfulness that gives an interesting twist to the action and even some of her lines. This strategem validates what Ruth tells Beneatha at the end of Act I, Scene 1: “You think you a woman, Bennie, but you still a little girl.” However, as the play moves along, Hall takes us along the emotional journey as this little girl quickly grows into a strong woman whose intelligence and acuity becomes an essential part of the Younger family’s resistance to racist disregard of their legitimate dreams.
Prince Peay played Travis in the show I caught. (He alternates in the role with another young actor, Kristopher King Clark.) Travis, just ten years old, is the future of this family and his benign ignorance of much of the ugliness of their life functions as one of the reassuring elements in the play. Prince Peay brings this out in a very commendable way.
But the two strongest performances in this clutch of strong performances come from the actors portraying the family’s two oldest members: Mama Lena and Walter. Eric B. Robinson’s Walter Lee Younger is superb. Walter Lee is on a gripping emotional spin from his first appearance on stage through to the uplifting climax. All the characters in this play go through a series of dark and light moods, but Walter goes through a greater range of moods than anyone else. Robinson hits the right notes in every one of the different moods Walter undergoes.
Even though Lorraine Hansberry couldn’t use the whole Langston Hughes poem as a title (such a title would have been too long to fit on a program or a poster), she was obviously thinking of the other lines in the poem as she wrote the play, especially the last line which wonders if dreams put on hold finally just explode.
At several points in this show, we see that Walter is just one more disappointment, one deferred dream away from exploding. A number of times during his bravura performance, Robinson reaches to that point but then pulls back just before the explosion. Those withheld explosions are then spun into Robinson forceful presentation of this complicated character.
I’ve never seen Melanye Finister give anything but a good performance. Nevertheless, Finister’s turn as Mama Lena has to be acknowledged as one of her best performances. At least among the performances I’ve been fortunate enough to see.
Lena is the anchor of the Younger family, and Finister’s Lena is the anchor of this family. In Finister masterfully nuanced performance, we see a woman who could have been broken by decades of dreams deferred but has instead turned her frustrations and hurts into inner strengths.
Whether it’s serving as referee in the sibling skirmishes between Beneatha and Walter, sharing hard-won nuggets of wisdom with daughter-in-law Ruth, or taking on the role of the loving grandmother of Travis, this Lena is a model of resilience and healing warmth.
Joseph Asagai, the Nigerian student who is involved with Beneatha, is the one character in the play that Hansberry drew somewhat unconvincingly. I suspect that’s because the playwright did not have as much personal contact with Africans as she did with Chicago’s Black and White folks. You need a solid performance to make Asagai credible, and fortunately, Nayib Felix gives just such performance. His Asagai is a fully sympathetic character who strengthens Beneatha with his own self-confidence and sense of purpose.
Jalen Coleman plays George Murchison, the quintessential Black bourgeoisie semi-boyfriend of Beneatha. Coleman plays the role impeccably. He’s able to make us almost like George for spurts, and then dislike him enough that we understand why Beneatha is sure she could never marry George despite his family’s wealth. Coleman’s interactions with Hall’s Beneatha and Robinson’s Walter Lee become defining moments in the show rather than dips in the script as they are in some productions.
Although Keith A. Lawrence’s character, Bobo, only makes one brief appearance in the play, it is an essential appearance, and Lawrence is commendable in the way he delivers the startling news he’s brought to the scene.
Karl Lindner, the representative from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association can be read as, and is often played as, something close to a caricature. But not in this production. Todd Lawson handles the assignment in a most convincing way. Lawson plays Lindner as a man trying hard to hide his nervousness and not really succeeding. Lindner knows that he is walking on eggshells that could suddenly explode, and so he measures his words and their impact very carefully. But not carefully enough. Lawson catches this very well and interacts with Walter Lee, Beneatha and – in his second appearance – Mama marvelously.
Along with the judicious direction and the excellent cast, the behind-the-scenes crew deserves praise for this production. James F. Pyne Jr. designed the set that puts us right into a dreary 1950s South Side Chicago apartment while DeAnna Doggett’s lighting design gave Pyne’s set design the right finishing touches. But then, a special nod goes to Jerrilyn Duckworth’s costume design. In this production, the costumes actually help define the characters and their place in the social order of that period’s Chicago. Duckworth also designed the show’s wigs, which I believe only involves Beneatha’s hair styles.
Chicago has changed a great deal since A Raisin In The Sun premiered 66 years ago. America has also changed a great deal, but a slew of major changes in America in recent months have given this classic a renewed relevance. The specific issues Lorraine Hansberry took up in the play are not as evident, but the underlying troubles that give this play its dynamic have returned in different guises. We can still learn from this play as well as enjoy it.
A Raisin in the Sun runs Tues. – Sun. at the Leonard C. Haas Stage of People’s Light (39 Conestoga Road, Malvern) until March 30. Performances are at 7:00 Tuesday through Friday, 2:00 and 7:00 Saturday and Sunday. However, there’s only a single 2:00 p.m. performance on Sunday, March 30.
The Trivia Trail
Before the curtain goes up and the play begins at People’s Light, you’ll hear a recorded announcement telling you that the play was written in 1957 when Hansberry was just 27. My introduction says that the play had its Broadway premiere in 1959.
This doesn’t mean that either the People’s Light people or your reviewer got our dates wrong. Though the play was written in ’57, it took two years for a production of the play to be mounted. Theatre angels in the Fifties thought a play with an almost entirely Black cast was a dicey investment, and the play’s producer needed a year-and-a-half to raise enough money to get the first production rolling, another half year to get it staged.
With this play, Lorraine Hansberry became the first female African American playwright to have a play produced on a Broadway stage. She also became, at the age of 29, the youngest American playwright to win New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. The Drama Critics Circle Award is considered one of the most prestigious prizes for plays produced in the Big Apple. The play was also nominated for a Tony Award (the most prestigious prize) as Best Play, but lost out to William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker.
That original production of A Raisin In The Sun boasted a star-studded cast. Ruby Dee played Ruth, Sidney Poitier played Walter, TV star Diane Sands was Beneatha and Lou Gosset, Jr – who just last year joined the Valhalla of great actors – was the original George Murchison. When Poitier left the show to fill some film roles, he was replaced by Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee’s husband. It was just one of the many projects Davis and Dee starred in together.
A Raisin In the Sun was not the first Broadway play to deal compellingly with postwar racism inAmerica and featuring a strong-willed black character pushing back against racism. In February 1946, a play with the simple title Jeb hit Broadway. Written by a White dramatist, Robert Ardrey, Jeb looked at the ordeals faced by Black World War II veteran who lost a leg in the war and then returns to his home in the Jim Crow South where he finds that his service and his sacrifice have still not earned him the respect he deserves.
The play received a number of excellent reviews by leading New York critics, but unfortunately closed after a run of one week. Several prominent people in the theatre scene surmised that the play was simply “ahead of its time”.
John Fiedler, who played Karl Lindner (that representative from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association) in both the original Broadway production and the film version, reprised this role in a major 25th anniversary revival of the classic in 1986. Fiedler was the only member of the original cast able to make a return for this revival.
In 1973, a musical version of this play, simply titled Raisin, opened on Broadway. The book for the musical was written by Robert Nemiroff, Loraine Hansberry’s widowed husband. It was nominated for eight Tony Awards (more than the original straight play garnered) and won two, including Best Musical. It also won the 1975 Grammy for the Best Score From The Original Cast Show Album.