When Women Take Center Stage is a blog series on dramacircle.org exploring plays that feature female protagonists. The second play we’ll look at is the celebrated 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry. This play, like our previous selection “Trouble in Mind”, was written by an African-American woman and concentrates on the racial dynamics of the 1950s. Both plays hold up surprisingly well on the 21st Century stage. Here there are three women that take center stage—Mama, Ruth and Beneatha. As described below, Hansberry discovers an imbalance in this matriarchal household, emblematic of a significant portion of the African-American community, and the implied resolution requires the reintegration of men—here, represented by Walter Lee, Jr.. This essay is adapted from program notes written for the PlayMakers Repertory 2013 production of the play.
The Deferred Dream and the Triumph of Dignity
By Mark Perry
A young man seethes with anger. He feels himself losing control, the ancestral dream of prosperity kneaded into him is slipping away. His dignity forsakes him. He picks up a brick, and he hurls it with all his might, that he might strike just the right target and drive away this threat to his well-being. The brick smashes most satisfyingly through glass and disappears in the house’s darkened interior. Inside, the brick just misses the head of a young girl, now huddling in a fear-defense response. Had that brick left his hand a fraction of a second sooner, had his arm pitched a bit left, then A Raisin in the Sun might not exist. But then were it NOT for that incident, it also might not exist.
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
The year was 1938. The girl inside that house was Lorraine Hansberry, and the man outside was a white protester in a Chicago neighborhood targeted by the activist Hansberry family as a front in the fight for housing integration. Young Lorraine's father, Carl Hansberry, a successful businessman and civil rights activist, took this battle all the way to the Supreme Court trying to force the law of the land to protect the dream of his people for equal standing and opportunity. He won, but only a narrow ruling, and so the walls of segregation remained intact. One dream sustained, another deferred.
The play A Raisin in the Sun is intrinsically rooted in that seminal experience, even if the fictional Younger family that inhabits the play bears little resemblance to the real-life Hansberrys. The protagonists of Raisin are a struggling, working class family that only stumbles into activism out of a basic desire to improve their lot in life. Young Lorraine was born into a well-to-do, highly-educated, politically-oriented family that was culturally part of the “Talented Tenth.” At 20, she moved to New York to pursue her dream of using writing for the Cause of civil rights for Blacks and women. She got a job helping to edit and write for family-friend Paul Robeson’s magazine, Freedom. She studied writing at the New School, took classes with the eminent W.E.B. Du Bois, and mingled with the Literati of New York and Harlem societies. One such associate was poet Langston Hughes, whose poem entitled “Harlem” and published in 1951, provides the image of the play’s title. His poem postulates and prophesies, through a shifting simile, his community’s different responses to oppression, presented as “a dream deferred.”
“What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?”
In 1959, A Raisin in the Sun exploded on the Broadway scene, garnering a host of “first time” achievements for Blacks on the mainstream American Stage. It was the first play by an African-American woman to play on Broadway, it had the first African-American director on Broadway (Lloyd Richards), and its cast included future royalty of the American stage and screen: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Louis Gossett Jr, and Ruby Dee. It won the first Drama Critics Circle award for best play for an African-American woman. (Raisin didn't win the Pulitzer; the distinction of first African-American playwright to do so would go to Charles Gordone in 1970.)
The Chicago Defender’s Nov 14, 1940 front page announcing the Hansberry v. Lee victory for housing (albeit with a narrow ruling)
Let’s be clear: the play broke through so many barriers not because of cynical tokenism, but by the sheer force of its eloquence. It delighted and moved audiences, black and white, with a fully-fledged realist presentation of an African-American family at a point when its ambitions were just merging with the civil rights fight. The Younger family is apolitical, except for Beneatha (who feels like a younger version of the author), and they seem indifferent to any struggle outside their immediate personal ones. Their current situation, however, is intolerable. Cramped poverty is rubbing raw their nerves, and this irritation turns to a bitterness that they mete out on each other. A generation ago, their small, rundown apartment was a temporary refuge on the family's way up the ladder from poverty. (Such a setting is emblematic, the housing equivalent of a dream deferred.) Now though, an insurance payment, following the death of the family’s father, brings a check for $10,000 into their hands. (That’s about $89,000 in 2020.) Such a windfall proves a test to probe the moral health of the family and reveal the divergent ideals of the children. These children are not just reassembled products of their parents’ natures; they also reflect the ambitions and values of a new, urbanized generation.
Photos from the 2013 PlayMakers Production of “A Raisin in the Sun”
From the time it was incorporated in 1837 by whites and its original Native American inhabitants were driven west of the Mississippi, Chicago—its name derived from the Miami – Illinois languages’ word for the wild onions of its shores—grew explosively. Destined by its location on an ambitious young nation’s western thrust, it rose up to meet the great needs of the expanding frame of 19th Century America—railroads, factories, stockyards, etc.—stretching itself out to become the City of the Big Shoulders. The large waves of immigrants that broke on the Lake Michigan shore did not dissipate evenly. Instead, they pooled in neighborhoods as the city expanded. The Irish in the 1840s, the Germans and Polish after the Civil War—each added its imprint and maintained its distinct ethnic character. By the time African-Americans arrived in large numbers during World War I, as part of a massive migration north to industrial cities with their promise of employment, it was as if they had arrived late to dinner at a crowded and noisy table. The already balkanized landscape saved its worst spots for them. By 1919, enough animosity had developed in the city to spark a major race riot with dozens dead, hundreds injured and a city deeply bruised.
Around this time, African-Americans began to organize their community affairs. The NAACP and the Urban League formed in the early years of the century, followed soon by Marcus Garvey’s UNIA. These and other organizations provided the African American community with different visions of its best way forward, whether that be education and intellectual cultivation, vocational training, economic empowerment, legal and political engagement, or mass migration back to Africa. Some advocated a revolutionary approach, others a gradual one.
The Hansberry home in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood.
A Raisin in the Sun is not a polemic advocating any of these approaches. Various characters, at times, seem to embody different philosophies, but in a grounded way characteristic of real life. This is part of the secret of the play’s longevity. Powerful themes do emerge out of the plays’ dramatic action, including the generational conflict over belief and agnosticism, expanding notions of gender roles, abortion and pre-Roe v. Wade options for women, betrayal of trust and abiding resilience within the Black community, the disillusionment of idealists and their desire to flee, the spiritual connection of African-Americans with the nations of post-colonial Africa. Some of these specific themes may feel more or less relevant today, since the battle lines of civil rights struggles are ever-changing.
One particular theme, however, of continued relevance today rises up to prominence near the end of the play. Although Walter Lee Younger, Sr. is reported to have died only recently, he is absent during the whole of the play. In a play with so many male characters, the household has a distinctly matriarchal feel, with such strong presence from Mama, Ruth and Beneatha. Walter Lee, Jr. is a central character, but his grounding in the home is tenuous. He seeks comfort by leaving it. This condition reflects a tragic reality of modern Black life: namely, the marked absence of the father figure in the African-American home, an absence with gnarled roots reaching back to slave trading. (Our previous national Patriarch, President Obama, is an African-American father who called for the healing of just this aspect of his culture.) It is in this domestic imbalance that we might best understand and justify Mama Younger’s most significant action in the play: her entrusting—not once but twice—the fate of the family to the morally ambivalent conscience of her son. She calls on him to arise to a station of manhood, of fatherhood, to step fully into the birthright of human dignity, not knowing, but trusting that her faith will not be in vain. From this perspective, the great ‘deferred dream’ may only be achieved when African-American men find their place again as the moral protagonists of the black family.
The last words go to Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote a note to her mother as the final touches were being put on the 1959 production of her play soon to become a landmark in American history.
“Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say.”