OVERVIEW
When the Younger family learns that an insurance check for $10,000 will be arriving soon, each member has plans for the money that will help his or her dreams come true. But when those dreams clash with each other and the realities of life for a struggling black family on Chicago’s Southside, the family almost falls apart. Only love and strong values bring the family back together and enable them to pursue the one dream that leads to the future.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Lorraine Hansberry’s classic family drama about the power of dreams and love is as relevant today as it was in 1959.

ABOUT THE PLAY
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun exploded onto the American theater scene on March 11, 1959, with such force that it garnered for the then-unknown black female playwright the Drama Circle Critics Award for 1958-59--in spite of such luminous competition as Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, and Archibald MacLeish's J.B. The play was the first on Broadway by a black woman and the first to be directed by a black director (Lloyd Bridges). The original cast included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Lou Gossett Jr., Diana Sands and other black actors who went on to luminous careers in stage and film.

Since its Broadway debut, Raisin has been translated into over thirty languages, including the language of the eastern German Sorbische minority, and has been produced in such culturally diverse places as China, the former Czechoslovakia, England, France, and the former Soviet Union. It was made into the 1961 Oscar winning film for which Hansberry wrote the screenplay, a 1989 American Playhouse TV film based on the 25th anniversary Roundabout Theatre production starring Danny Glover and Esther Rolle, revived on Broadway in 2004 starring Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Phylicia Rashad, and produced again for television with the same cast in 2008. Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New York in 1973 (Book by Robert Nemiroff, music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Britten), winning the 1974 Tony Award for Best Musical.

The play’s universal appeal defies some of the early critics' views of Raisin as being simply "a play about Negroes." Although Raisin addresses specific problems of a black family in Southside Chicago, it also mirrors the very real problems of all people. In an interview with social historian Studs Terkel, Hansberry explained, ". . . in order to create the universal, you must pay very close attention to the specific."

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the last of four children born to the independent, politically active, Republican, and well-to-do Carl and Nannie Perry Hansberry. Hospitals were required at that time to list the racial identities of newborns; however, upon receiving their daughter's birth certificate, Hansberry's parents crossed out the word "Negro" and wrote "Black," an act of minor significance but certainly a testament to the Afrocentric ideology that the elder Hansberrys bequeathed to their children.

Although 1930 is the year that most Americans associate with the Great Depression, Hansberry's family remained economically solvent through this period. By 1930’s standards, the Hansberrys were certainly upper middle class, but by the standards of most Chicago blacks, many of whom lived in abject poverty at this time, they would have been considered "rich."

Hansberry was never comfortable with her "rich girl" status, identifying instead with the "children of the poor." Admiring the feistiness exhibited by these children who were so often left alone, Hansberry often imitated their maturity and independence.

They wore house keys around their necks, symbols of their "latchkey children" status, so Hansberry decided to wear keys around her neck--any keys that she might find, including skate keys--so that she too might be thought of as one of them. The characters in Raisin do not know the middle-class comforts of the Hansberry family; in her plays, Hansberry focuses on the class of black people whom she cared most about, even though her knowledge of these people was, at best, peripheral.

Though Hansberry grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Woodlawn neighborhood, she never lived in a "Younger" household, although she closely observed such households throughout her childhood. Hansberry's father, Carl, not only established one of the first black savings banks in Chicago, but he was also a successful real estate businessman. Credited with developing the concept of the "kitchenette," the studio apartment, he was able to maximize all available space, converting a large area into several smaller areas.
The family then moved into an all-white neighborhood, where they faced racial discrimination. Hansberry attended a predominantly white public school while her parents fought against segregation. Always politically active, Hansberry’s father engaged in a legal battle against a racially restrictive covenant that attempted to prohibit African-American families from buying homes in a white area where no other blacks lived. The legal struggle over the Hansberry’s move to the neighborhood led to the landmark Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940).

Hansberry reflects upon the litigation in her book To Be Young, Gifted, and Black:

"25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… 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. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."
Such traumatic memories were probably a part of the reason that Hansberry incorporated into her first play the theme of a black family's courageous decision to move into a hostile and new environment.

When Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, she had every intention of remaining there for the four years necessary for graduation. However, after two years, her growing interest in the arts took her other places for brief periods. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago, Roosevelt College, the New School of Social Research in New York, and studied art in Guadalajara, Mexico. In New York, she worked on the staff of Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine, hung around the theater, read plays, and honed her craft. Several critics have noted that Hansberry's artwork, her drawings and sketches, is almost as noteworthy as her writing.

Her father's death at the age of fifty-one touched Hansberry deeply; she often said that it was perhaps her father's constant battle with the forces of racism that hastened his early death. Interestingly, the cause and effect of much of the action in Raisin evolves as a consequence of the death of Big Walter, a character whom the audience never sees, although much of the dialogue contains references to him.

Hansberry's own untimely death of pancreatic cancer at the age of thirty-four on January 12, 1965, left a void in American theater and in the circle of black writers. Jean Carey Bond, in an article in Freedomways magazine, says of Hansberry: "[Her] brief sojourn was, in one of its dimensions, a study in pure style. Born into material comfort, yet baptized in social responsibility; intensely individual in her attitudes and behavior, yet sensitive to the wills and aspirations of a whole people; a lover of life, yet stalked by death--she deliberately fashioned out of these elements an articulate existence of artistic and political commitment, seasoned with that missionary devotion which often intensifies the labors of the mortally ill."

Hansberry left behind three unfinished plays which were compiled into a collection titled Les Blancs, and an unfinished semi-autobiographical novel which was adapted into the play and book To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Both were edited and adapted by her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff.

Her Works
• A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• A Raisin in the Sun (film), screenplay (1961)
• A Raisin in the Sun (film), produced (2008)
• On Summer (Essay)
• The Drinking Gourd (1960)
• The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)
• The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1965)
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)
• Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)

Source: James, Rosetta. CliffsNotes on A Raisin in the Sun. 17 Mar 2009

DIRECTOR'S NOTE
On March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun made history as it opened on Broadway. It was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. It was a critical and popular hit and became a classic of the American theatre. There have been a number of Broadway revivals, several film and TV versions and countless regional theatre productions over those fifty years. And, if one reads the play or sees one of the incarnations, it isn’t hard to appreciate why the play is still produced. The greatness of the play is based on the actions of a family as it struggles to achieve at least a portion of the elusive American dream.

Lorriane Hansberry wrote the play based in part on personal experience. Her father, Carl Hansberry, was a housing activist in Chicago and as part of his battle against restrictive covenants, he moved his family into a white neighborhood in 1937. They were met with violence and lawsuits. The play accurately reflects the mood and conditions of Chicago in the fifties. Carl Hansberry eventually won the court case, Hansberry v. Lee, in a 1940 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the experience of her family, Lorraine Hansberry wrote a play with great attention to detail but that didn’t tell the audience what to think. Obviously, she had a personal opinion but she chose not to write a piece of propaganda but rather a play that let audience make up its’ own mind. The critic Harold Clurman remarked that the play “is not intended as an appeal to whites or as a preachment for Negroes. It is an honestly felt response to a situation that has been lived through, clearly understood and therefore simply and impressively stated. Most important of all: having been written from a definite point of view … with no eye toward meretricious possibilities in showmanship and public relations, the play throws light on aspects of American life quite outside the area of race.” And that’s really the point, what makes A Raisin in the Sun a great play isn’t a discussion of race relations or the politics and economics of America in the fifties, it’s that Hansberry has written a play about an American family striving for a better life. The fictional Younger family all have different opinions and goals - they fight, they celebrate, they cry, they laugh and they dream – just like what happens in real families. It’s a great play because we can laugh and cry right along with them, because we share the goals they reach and because we can understand the family dynamics.

It seems fitting to produce this play about a family’s dreams of advancement during the first year in the history of the United States that we have an African-American President. It can be argued President Obama was elected due to his eloquent restatement of the American dream during the campaign – he painted a vivid image to the electorate that we all share in the same hopes and dreams, and that there is still much work to do as a nation. Even in 2009 some of the issues raised by A Raisin in the Sun more than fifty years ago – race relations, economic disparities and familial strife - remain unsolved. Don’t think of A Raisin in the Sun as merely a period piece but as a play that can show us how far, and how little, we have progressed as a nation over the last half century.

CONNECTIONS & CONTEXTS
WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM DEFERRED?: A RAISIN IN THE SUN AND LANGSTON HUGHES’ POEM
Hansberry took her title from Langston Hughes’ powerful poem, “Harlem”

HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN CHICAGO
Explore the evolution of African American life on Chicago’s Southside from the Great Migration to Obama

WHAT IS AFROCENTRISM?
When RAISIN was first written in 1959, few, if any, had heard of this controversial but increasingly popular approach to multiculturalism.

RESOURCES

VIDEOS
• The 1961 film trailer
• Scene from the original film
• The trailer for the 2008 film of RAISIN
• Scene from the 2008 film

FILMS
• DVDs of both the 1961 and 2008 film versions are available for purchase and rental.

FURTHER READING
• By Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Les Blancs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
• “HARLEM” by Langston Hughes
• Read more about Langston Hughes