Pan-Africanism

women; and Diana Sands played Beneatha, a freethinking college student. Highlighted were Ruby Dee as Ruth Younger, Ivan Dixon as Joseph Asagai, playwright Lonne Elder III as Bobo, John Fiedler as Karl Lindner, Louis Gossett as George Murchison, Ed Hall and the Negro Ensemble Company founder Douglas Turner Ward as Moving Men, and Glynn Turman as Travis Younger. Activist Harry Belafonte, actress June Havoc, poet Langston Hughes, athlete Jackie Robinson, publisher Dorothy Schiff, and journalist Chuck Stone, among others, went to the theater on opening night to see the production. The opening night cast and production staff were, and remain up to the present, a veritable who’s who of Black theater and performance history.

About the Relevant Criticism Blacks in America have been in Lena and Walter’s predicament from “forty acres and a mule” in Reconstruction to the overuse of subprime mortgages in 2007-09. Because of the singularity of Hansberry’s technique when it came to writing about family and home, James Baldwin, who eulogized his very close friend in the pages of Esquire magazine after her death at age thirty-four from pancreatic cancer, argued that “[w]hat is relevant here is that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.” The reporting in Black daily newspapers asked readers to consider how and why they believed what they believed about Black people and theater history. Langston Hughes, author of the 1951 poem “Harlem” from which the title was taken, wrote in his Chicago Defender review: “At the Blackstone Theater in Chicago recently I saw a play that bids fair to become a milestone in Negro dramatic art. It is A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, a young Chicago writer, who knows the Southside whereof she writes. Written by a Negro playwright, acted by Negro actors (with one exception), and directed by a high-talented Negro director, it is a play of which not only colored playgoers, but all lovers of the best in American theater can be proud.”

—ERIC M. GLOVER

1974 1983 1986 1989 2004 2014

Awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical. Production by 127th Street Repertory Ensemble, New York, directed by Ernie McClintock and featuring Tupac (“Makaveli”/“2Pac”) Shakur as Ruth and Walter’s son, Travis.

25th-anniversary production by Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, directed by Dennis Scott and starring Delroy Lindo. Production by The Roundabout Theatre Company, New York, directed by Harold Scott and starring James Pickens, Jr. and later at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, directed by Harold Scott and starring Delroy Lindo. Airing of the American Playhouse episode, directed by Bill Duke and starring Danny Glover. Production at the Royale Theater, New York, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Sean (“Diddy”/“P Diddy”/ “Puff Daddy”/ “Puffy”) Combs. Production at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York, directed by Kenny Leon and starring Denzel Washington. Awarded the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

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13 1: Delroy Lindo and Troy Streater in the Yale Repertory Theatre production in 1983, directed by Dennis Scott, Photo by William B. Carter. 2: Audra McDonald and Sean Combs in the 2004 Royale Theater production. Photo by Joan Marcus. 3: Denzel Washington and LaTanya Richardson in the 2014 revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Photo by Brigitte Lacomb/AP.

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