Production History

Lydia R. Diamond (1969–) Stick Fly (2006): Lydia R. Diamond’s play picks up where Hansberry leaves off, showing that material prosperity comes at much too high a cost for Blacks.

Nambi E. Kelley (1973–) Native Son (Yale Repertory Theatre, 2017): In Nambi E. Kelley’s theatrical adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, Bigger is hampered by a miasma of crime. (Paul Green and Richard Wright also adapted the novel for the stage in 1941.)

Ama Ata Aidoo (1942–) The Dilemma of a Ghost (1964): African Ato and African American Eulalie marry, thus testing their definite beliefs about each other.

Alice Childress (1916–94) Trouble in Mind: A Comedy-Drama in Two Acts (1955): Aging Wiletta Mayer, star of the play within a play Chaos in Belleville, swallows her pride and takes on the role of a stereotype.

Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) Peculiar Sam; or, the Underground Railroad: A Musical Drama in Four Acts (1879): The first musical by a Black person; Sam who is himself enslaved secretly helps family members to reach the North on the Underground Railroad.

Kirsten Greenidge The Luck of the Irish (2012): Grandchildren of the African American Taylors face eviction from their Boston home when the Irish-American ghost buyers Joe and Patty Ann lay claim to it.

Gloria Bond Clunie Living Green (2009): Angela and Frank Freeman, an upwardly mobile mid-1990s Chicago African American couple, consider a return to the neighborhood of their youth to humble their children.

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65) A Raisin in the Sun: A Drama in Three Acts (1959): Discriminatory housing practices and poverty—affecting behavior, health outcomes, and learning—threaten the Youngers with destruction.

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958) Rachel (1916): The title character in Angelina Weld Grimké’s play promises herself to never bring children into the world because of extrajudicial killings of Blacks.

Eulalie Spence (1894-1981) The Fool’s Errand (1927): The first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway; busybodies are on a wild goose chase determining an unborn child’s biological father.

“NOT ONLY WHAT IS BUT WHAT IS POSSI BLE”: A Raisin in the Sun as a Living, Breathing Example of Black Theater and Performance History

The artist creating a realistic work shows not only what is but what is possible—which is part of reality too. —LORRAINE HANSBERRY, “MAKE NEW SOUNDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH LORRAINE HANSBERRY BY STUDS TERKEL”

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun made history when it became the second play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway; Eulalie Spence’s 1927 Krigwa Players comedy The Fool’s Errand was the first with its one performance. However, recognizing Spence as the first in no way lessens Hansberry’s impact on American theater. The fifth woman, first Black, and youngest recipient of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play for 1958–59, Hansberry and her play were revived later in new productions Off-Broadway and all across the country. Raisin was adapted into a film starring Sidney Poitier in 1961, and a musical starring Joe Morton in 1973. Not only were there amateur and professional productions of Raisin in what was then Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, and Russia, but there were also critical editions and translations of Raisin in at least thirty foreign languages. This article and accompanying chronology of historical events explores the original Broadway production through the life of the playwright and the making of her play in order to detail how the opening night cast and production staff animated her play and set a standard for expressive culture on the stage in and out of Black America. About the World of the Play A Raisin in the Sun provides the audience an opportunity to see what is usually referred to as kitchen-sink realism or, rather, the squalid aspects of everyday life. Characters who have to overcome loneliness from those around them because of the differences in their dreams drive this penetrating psychological study of Black working-class values in the early 1950s on Chicago’s South Side. Lena Younger (“Mama”) wants to put money from her dearly departed husband’s life-insurance policy toward: (a) a down payment on a home in Clybourne Park, a white Chicago neighborhood with discriminatory housing practices, and (b) medical school for her daughter, Beneatha Younger, who is herself based on Hansberry. Lena’s son, Walter Lee Younger (“Brother”), a chauffeur hired to drive people around the city, wants to put money toward owning and operating a liquor store with Bobo and Willy Harris. Walter considers selling out to Karl Lindner, representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, when one of his friends escapes with his money. About the Author of the Play The facts of Hansberry v. Lee, the 1940 law case Hansberry’s father Carl argued successfully in court, contributed to the development of the play. Inspired by Hansberry’s experience of being born in a high-income family but raised in lowincome housing, A Raisin in the Sun embodied and expressed Hansberry’s experience with anti-Black racism at age eight: “My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed, and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.” Hansberry and her family endured attacks by whites when they moved amid white domestic terrorism into a white Chicago neighborhood with discriminatory housing practices. Given the fact that the creative work was inspired by an event in the real world, Steven R. Carter, author of Hansberry’s Drama, made a case for reading Hansberry’s autobiographical writings closely: “The incident will form part of the background for Lorraine’s most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, the first draft of which concludes with the black family sitting in the dark, armed, awaiting an attack by hostile whites.” The first draft of

1940

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Hansberry v. Lee that the law forbade de facto racial segregation in white Chicago neighborhoods.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka that the “separate but equal” racial doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson in public education violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. 1954

Activist Rosa Parks chose to not give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, igniting the Montgomery bus boycott. 1955

Two white men kidnapped Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago’s South Side, and killed him for the crime of whistling at white woman Carolyn Bryant— something he did not do—while spending summer vacation in Mississippi.

the play’s storyline about white domestic terrorism has been lost to the dustbin of 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 “[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 McNeil played Lena, a good-natured but tyrannical matriarch; Academy Award-nominated Poitier played Walter, a frustrated man who was surrounded by too many

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. 1957

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. 1959

Release of the Columbia Pictures Entertainment film, directed by Daniel Petrie and starring Sidney Poitier. 1961

Awarded the Festival de Cannes Prix Gary Cooper. Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer. 1965

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. 1973

Production at the Adelphi Theater, London, directed by Lloyd Richards and starring Earle Hyman. 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.