By Douglas Langworthy, Literary Manager, Denver Center Theatre Company
As a literary manager, a lot of new plays come across my desk. But it’s interesting to think about the fact that every play was at some point in its history a new play. At the moment I’ve been thinking about Lorraine Hansberry’s A RAISIN IN THE SUN, which has long been considered an American classic, right up there with A Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman. But back on March 10, 1959, the day before Raisin premiered on Broadway, 28-year-old Lorraine Hansberry and her first play were both unknown quantities. The previews had been rocky and neither playwright not producer Philip Rose had particularly high hopes. It’s true, the production had a lot going for it besides Hansberry’s rock-solid script: both Sidney Portier (as Walter Lee) and Ruby Dee (as Ruth) were rising film actors (Portier had already made The Blackboard Jungle and The Defiant Ones while audiences knew Ruby Dee from The Jackie Robinson Story and Edge of the City, which starred Portier). The production also featured Claudia McNeil, an established stage actress, as Mama, and relatively unknown directing upstart named Lloyd Richards.
Russell Hornsby as Walter Lee. Photo by Terry Shapiro.
But as we all know, the production was a triumph both as a human drama and a political statement. The issues the play raises about the hurdles African-Americans face trying to advance in a segregated society were new to mainstream theatre audiences. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson was struck by the play’s social resonance: “A RAISIN IN THE SUN has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it….It is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate.”
The play stirred up considerable critical controversy at that time, in the days before the advances of the Civil Rights movement: Was the play intended for black or white audiences? Was this a specific story of a black family facing segregation on the South Side of Chicago, or a universal story about the power of the human spirit? Was Hansberry, who grew up in a middle class family, able to truthfully speak for members of the lower middle class?
To that last question, here’s what Hansberry had to say: “I come from an extremely comfortable background, materially speaking. And yet we live in a ghetto, …which automatically means intimacy with all classes and all kinds of experiences. It’s not any more difficult for me to know the people I wrote about than it is for me to know members of my family. This is one of the things that the American experience has meant to Negroes. We are one people.”
To the second question, Hansberry responded: “From the moment the first curtain goes up until the Youngers make their
Dawn Scott as Beneatha and Tyee Tilghmann as George Murchison. Photo by Terry Shapiro.
decision at the end, the fact of racial oppression, unspoken and unalluded to, other than the fact of how they live, is through the play. It’s inescapable. …It is always distinctly there but overtly it isn’t introduced until they are asked by the author to act on the problem which is the decision to move or not move out of this area.”
I believe this point, the fact that racism is inescapable, is one of the strongest reasons her play has become an American classic. Classics speak to us through time because something about them is still relevant to our lives, and even though we have an African-American President, racism is still inescapable in this country. And we still need plays like A RAISIN IN THE SUN to remind us of that.
One final note: I think it’s an incredible stroke of fate that RAISIN’s original director Lloyd Richards would go on to mentor playwright August Wilson whose work might never have been so readily accepted without Hansberry having prepared the ground.
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