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f Black Theater and Performance History Frequently seeing plays led Hansberry, self-taught as a playwright, to her own creative work. Jesse H. Walker covering Hansberry in the New York Amsterdam News, a Black daily newspaper flanking Atlanta Daily World, Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, Los Angeles Sentinel, and the Pittsburgh Courier, reported: “She told her husband she could write a play involving the Negro in which the characters would be fully dimensional and would have problems as people, problems and persons who would transcend the specifics of their being Negro.” Hansberry was a student of the theater haunted by popular white theatrical representations of Blackness, such as Marc Connelly’s 1930 play The Green Pastures; George and Ira Gershwin’s 1935 musical Porgy and Bess, which was itself based on Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s 1927 play Porgy; and Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play The Emperor Jones. She intrinsically sought theatrical representations of Black people’s concerns and conditions that were worthy of their complexity. When it came to the care and the superintendence that Hansberry showed for text and performance, authorized biographer Margaret B. Wilkerson argued that in theory and practice
1957 1959 A dinner at Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff’s Greenwich Village apartment ended with a reading from her latest draft of A Raisin in the Sun and with Philip Rose signing on as the producer of the play before and beyond Broadway. The Little Rock Nine, a group of Black high school students, endured attacks from their white peers when they integrated the public school system.
Original Broadway production at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York, directed by Lloyd Richards and starring Sidney Poitier. Awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. Production at the Adelphi Theater, London, directed by Lloyd Richards and starring Earle Hyman.
“[t]he theater was a working laboratory for this brilliant woman whose sighted eyes and feeling heart caused her to reach out to a world at once cruel and beautiful.”
About the Script’s Production History
There were only a month and a half of rehearsals with the script before it played public performances on January 21, 1959, at the Shubert Theatre, New Haven. The script excited Philip Rose so much so that he recruited Sidney Poitier to star. Poitier then in turn recruited Lloyd Richards, who would later become artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama, to direct. Regrettably, Cynthia Belgrave’s role of Mrs. Johnson, the Youngers’ nice-nasty next-door neighbor who warned them of a bomb that awaited them should they move to Clybourne Park, was cut out in rehearsal. David J. Cogan and Rose took the play first to New Haven, then Philadelphia, then Chicago while waiting for an available theater on Broadway. A Raisin in the Sun was first presented on Broadway by Cogan and Rose on March 11, 1959, bolstered by $75,000.00 from 147 investors (unheard-of back in the day). Claudia
1961 1965
Release of the Columbia Pictures Entertainment film, directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Sidney Poitier.
Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer.
1973
Original Broadway production of the musical Raisin based on the play at the 46th Street Theater, New York, directed and choreographed by Donald McKayle and starring Joe Morton.
Awarded the Festival de Cannes Prix Gary Cooper.
Right: Louis Gossett, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier in the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 1959, directed by Lloyd Richards. Friedman-Abeles Collection, New York Public Library.
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