To A Jasper
A Raisin in the Sun
The 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun was a watershed in theatrical history. At a time when there was perceived to be no black Broadway audience, no commercial viability for serious black play, and no significant “crossover” white audience for a play about African Americans, the underdog Raisin achieved the impossible: an all-out commercial and critical success. Indeed, its theretofore unknown 29-year-old playwright won the Best Play of the Year Award from the New York Drama Critics, the first black author and only the fifth woman to do so.
In A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry paints an impressive group portrait of the Younger, a family composed of powerful individuals who are yet in many ways typical in their dreams and frustrations. There is Lena, or Mama, the widowed mother; her daughter Beneatha, a medical student: Baneatha’s brother Walter, a struggling chauffeur; and Walter’s wife, Ruth, and their young son. Crammed together in an airless apartment, the family dreams of better days. Walter longs unrealistically for riches and resents being under his mother’s thumb, while the intelligent and idealistic Beneatha searches for her own identity and that for her race. The family situation is brought to a crisis when Lena receives the first real money they have ever had: $10,000, the insurance payment on her husband’s life. The family finally has the means to buy a house of their own, but the dream proves difficult to achieve, as the first Walter’s rage over a lifetime of thwarted dreams, then the hostility of their new white neighbors, would seem to threaten the family’s security and even their self-respect.
In retrospect, Lorraine Hansberry seems to have been astoundingly prescient in highlighting the very issues that would soon leap into prominence in the ’60s and become central themes in the collective consciousness. Hansberry foresaw what in effect turned out to be a revolution in racial, sexual, and social thought: the reawakening of feminist thought after the conservative ’50s that inspired many women to make an active place for themselves outside of the home; the surge of African American pride, the “black is beautiful” ideal that would become so important in the ’60s; the increasingly confrontational scenes in the old battles over integration and equality of opportunity.
While A Raisin in the Sun is very much of its moment, it has also proven to be for all time; its relevance to modern life, its perpetual popularity, is attested to by the fact that it has continued over there and a half decades to be given important and innovative new productions. It has established itself as an American classic.
The 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun was a watershed in theatrical history. At a time when there was perceived to be no black Broadway audience, no commercial viability for serious black play, and no significant “crossover” white audience for a play about African Americans, the underdog Raisin achieved the impossible: an all-out commercial and critical success. Indeed, its theretofore unknown 29-year-old playwright won the Best Play of the Year Award from the New York Drama Critics, the first black author and only the fifth woman to do so.
In A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry paints an impressive group portrait of the Younger, a family composed of powerful individuals who are yet in many ways typical in their dreams and frustrations. There is Lena, or Mama, the widowed mother; her daughter Beneatha, a medical student: Baneatha’s brother Walter, a struggling chauffeur; and Walter’s wife, Ruth, and their young son. Crammed together in an airless apartment, the family dreams of better days. Walter longs unrealistically for riches and resents being under his mother’s thumb, while the intelligent and idealistic Beneatha searches for her own identity and that for her race. The family situation is brought to a crisis when Lena receives the first real money they have ever had: $10,000, the insurance payment on her husband’s life. The family finally has the means to buy a house of their own, but the dream proves difficult to achieve, as the first Walter’s rage over a lifetime of thwarted dreams, then the hostility of their new white neighbors, would seem to threaten the family’s security and even their self-respect.
In retrospect, Lorraine Hansberry seems to have been astoundingly prescient in highlighting the very issues that would soon leap into prominence in the ’60s and become central themes in the collective consciousness. Hansberry foresaw what in effect turned out to be a revolution in racial, sexual, and social thought: the reawakening of feminist thought after the conservative ’50s that inspired many women to make an active place for themselves outside of the home; the surge of African American pride, the “black is beautiful” ideal that would become so important in the ’60s; the increasingly confrontational scenes in the old battles over integration and equality of opportunity.
While A Raisin in the Sun is very much of its moment, it has also proven to be for all time; its relevance to modern life, its perpetual popularity, is attested to by the fact that it has continued over there and a half decades to be given important and innovative new productions. It has established itself as an American classic.
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