Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

When Mama Lena and Beneatha are felled by news of Walter Lee's weakness and dishonesty, their life's w ill the desired greening of their humanity is defoliated.

His name is Lindner (as in "neither a bor- rower nor a Lindner be"), and the thirty or so "pieces of silver" he proffers are meant to help the niggers understand the dichotomous dream.

(Pause) Put a lot of nice butter on it?

Similarly, Walter Lee and Ruth's dialogues lay out his male chauvinism and even self- and group-hate born of the frustration of too many dreams too long deferred: the powerlessness of black people to control their own fate or that of their families in capitalist America where race is place, white is right, and money makes and defines the man.

(The boy gives her an exasperated look for her lack of understanding, and eats grudgingly) TRAVIS You think Grandmama would have it?

You ain't even looked at it and you have decided (Crumpling his papers) Well, you tell that to my boy tonight when you put him to sleep on the living-room couch .

(A Yoruba exclamation for admiration) You wear it well . . . very well . . . mutilated hair and all.

And it is one reason why some critics will always have a problem with the realism of a Hansberry and ignore the multilayered rich- ness of her form.

She is, on the one hand, secure in the collegiate world of "ideas" and elitism, above the mass; on the other, undeceived by the myths and symbols of class and status.

If we opponents of racism, sexism, and the degeneracies of capitalism today were to write Richard the Nix and Ronnie the Rex, we would not be called the Bard's heirs, although it is the bourgeoisie who came to shower celebration on Shakespeare now they provide sterile, dead productions to hide the real texts.

BENEATHA listens, enraptured, her 76 A RAISIN IN THE SUN 77 eyes jar away "back to the past."

This is also why Shake- A RAISIN IN THE SUN 11 speare deals with race (Othello), anti-Semitism (The Merchant of Venice), and feminism (The Taming of the Shrew) ; because these will be the continuing dilemmas of the bourgeois epoch!

(RUTH follows her with her eyes as she goes to the phonograph and puts on a record and turns and waits ceremoniously for the music to come up.

Or fester like a sore And then run?

Hansberry's warnings about neo-colonialism and the growth (and corruption) of a post-colonial African bour- geoisie "the servants of empire," as Asagai calls them are dazzling because of their subsequent replication by reality.

The role itself of family head, folksy counsel, up- holder of tradition has caused many people to see her as the stereotyped "black matriarch" of establishment and commercial sociological fame.

(He rises and finds a cigarette in her handbag on the table and crosses to the little window and looks out, smoking and deeply enjoying this first one) RUTH (Almost matter of factly, a complaint too automatic to deserve emphasis) Why you always got to smoke before you eat in the morning?

Hansberry's warnings about neo-colonialism and the growth (and corruption) of a post-colonial African bour- geoisie "the servants of empire," as Asagai calls them are dazzling because of their subsequent replication by reality.

She gives in at last to his raunchiness and in a fit of giggling allows herself to be drawn into his mood.

And she always saw the present and future in the light of the past clear back to the slavery of the Old 8 A RAISIN IN THE SUN South and the new slavery that followed for black workers who migrated to the industrial ghettos of the North.

Walter Lee's dream has festered, and in his dealings with the slack-jawed con man Willie (merchant of the stuff of dreams), his dream is "running."

WALTER (Looking MURCHISON over from head to toe, scrutinizing his carefully casual tweed sports jacket over cashmere V-neck sweater over soft eyelet shirt and tie, and soft slacks, finished off with white buckskin shoes) Why all you college boys wear them faggoty-looking white shoes?

And this is another legacy of the play: It was one of the shots fired (and still being fired) at the aberrant white-supremacy dream that is American reality.

Part militant, part dilletante, "liberated" woman, little girl, she questions everything and dreams of service to humanity, an identity beyond self and family in the liberation struggles of her people.

Not since Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1938) has there been a play so thoroughly and expertly reflective of class struggle within a black family.

If we opponents of racism, sexism, and the degeneracies of capitalism today were to write Richard the Nix and Ronnie the Rex, we would not be called the Bard's heirs, although it is the bourgeoisie who came to shower celebration on Shakespeare now they provide sterile, dead productions to hide the real texts.

WALTER stands and stares back at her with defiance, and suddenly reaches into his pocket again on an afterthought) WALTER (Without even looking at his son, still staring hard at his wife) In fact, here's another fifty cents .

In February 1960, black students at North Carolina A & T began to "sit in" at Woolworth's in a more forceful attack on segregated public facilities.

(The boy finally turns around and rolls his eyes at her, knowing the mood has changed and he is vindicated; he does not, however, move toward her yet) Not for nothing in this world!

Not since Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1938) has there been a play so thoroughly and expertly reflective of class struggle within a black family.

It was the "explosion" Langston Hughes talked about in his great poem "Harlem" centerpiece of his incomparable 16 A RAISIN IN THE SUN Montage of a Dream Deferred, from which the play's title was taken and it informs the play as its twinned projec- tion: dream or coming reality.

He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties, inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment) WALTER Is he out yet?

All of Raisin's characters speak to the text and are critical to its dramatic tensions and understanding.

You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity! 9 ' (He laughs) BENEATHA (Turning to him, not laughing) Yes (Her face is quizzical, profoundly disturbed) 62 A RAISIN IN THE SUN ASAGAI (Still teasing and reaching out and taking her face in his hands and turning her profile to him) Well . . . it is true that this is not so much a profile of a Holly- wood queen as perhaps a queen of the Nile (A mock dismissal of the importance of the question) But what does it matter?

They play Walter Lee more aggressively, more self-consciously, so that when he does fall we can actually hate him hate the frivolous, selfish male-chauvinist part of ourselves.

The role itself of family head, folksy counsel, up- holder of tradition has caused many people to see her as the stereotyped "black matriarch" of establishment and commercial sociological fame.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN To Mama: in gratitude for the dream What happens to a dream deferred?

Any useful re-appreciation 9 10 A RAISIN IN THE SUN of it cannot be limited, therefore, to the passages restored or the new values discovered, important though these are: it is the play itself, as a dramatic (and sociopolitical) whole, that demands our confirmation of its grandeur.

MAMA Son I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers but ain't nobody in my family never let nobody pay 'em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn't fit to walk the earth.

The next two explosions in black drama, Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie and my own Dutchman (both 1964) raise up the militance and self-defense clamor of the movement as it came fully into the Malcolm era: Jimmy by constructing a debate between King (Meridian) and Richard (Malcolm) , and I by having Clay openly advocate armed resistance.

(Enunciating precisely but soundlessly: "There's a white man at the doorr They stop dancing, RUTH cuts off the phonograph, BENEATHA opens the door.

When Raisin first appeared in 1959, the Civil Rights Movement was in its earlier stages.

Miss Hansberry works within the confines of what might be called a kitchen-sink drama, set in a cramped, tri-generational household on the South Side in the 1950s.

He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties, inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment) WALTER Is he out yet?

RUTH (Mimicking) Aw gaaaaalleeeee, Mama!

And the play is also a summation of those shots, that battle, its heightened state- ment.

Her Lena is a woman, black, poor, struggle-worn but proud and loving.

Her speech is a mixture of many things; it is different from the rest of the family's insofar as education has per- meated her sense of English and perhaps the Midwest rather than the South has finally at last won out in her inflection; but not altogether, be- cause over all of it is a soft slurring and trans- formed use of vowels which is the decided influ- ence of the Southside.

(She pushes him, with rough playfulness and finality, toward the door) Get on out of here or you going to be late.

And she posed all her concerns in a work that portrayed a black family with a greater realism and complexity than had ever been previously seen on an American stage.

Throughout the work, Hansberry addresses herself to issues that the very young might feel only The Color Purple has raised.

Ah-sah-guy .

What is most telling about our igno- rance is that Hansberry's play still remains overwhelmingly popular and evocative of black and white reality, and the masses of black people dug it true.

Part militant, part dilletante, "liberated" woman, little girl, she questions everything and dreams of service to humanity, an identity beyond self and family in the liberation struggles of her people.

(Shouting and thumping his chest) FLAM- ING SPEAR!

BENEATHA (Cutting GEORGE off and staring at him as she replies to RUTH) It means someone who is willing to give up his own culture and submerge himself com- pletely in the dominant, and in this case oppressive culture!

Yet, with remark- able prescience, she saw history whole: Her play encom- passes everything from the rise of black nationalism in the United States and Africa to the advent of black militancy to the specific dimensions of the black woman's liberation movement.

In one second we will hear all about the great Ashanti empires; the great Songhay civilizations; and the great sculpture of B6nin and then some poetry in the Bantu and the whole monologue will end with the word heritage!

Looks chilly out this morning.

George Thompson in Poetry and Marxism points out that drama is the most expressive artistic form to emerge out of great social transformation.

RUTH ( With a frown ) Bobo?

It dealt with them with an unabating dramatic force, vision, political concreteness and clarity that, in retrospect, are awesome.

BENEATHA, in dun- garees, with a handkerchief tied around her face, is spraying insecticide into the cracks in the walls.

Hansberry has Beneatha grappling with key contro- versies of the period, but also some that had yet to clearly surface.

(He finds a beer in the refrigerator, wanders over to MURCHISON, sipping and wiping his lips with 84 A RAISIN IN THE SUN the back of his hand, and straddling a chair back- wards to talk to the other man) Shrewd move.

Alaiyo: Perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power.

We thought her play "middle class" in that its focus seemed to be on "moving into white folks' neighborhoods," when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto shacks.

He is singing and wiggling and snapping his fingers.

The truth is that Hansberry's dramatic skills have yet to be properly appreciated and not just by those guardians of the status quo who pass themselves off as dramatic critics.

Entrepreneur!

And as a document reflecting the essence of those struggles, the play is un- excelled.

(He finds a beer in the refrigerator, wanders over to MURCHISON, sipping and wiping his lips with 84 A RAISIN IN THE SUN the back of his hand, and straddling a chair back- wards to talk to the other man) Shrewd move.

(With her fingers practically up to her nos- trils} And I'm going to get in it and I am going to sit ... and sit ... and sit in that hot water and the first person who knocks to tell me to hurry up and come out BENEATHA Gets shot at sunrise.

(Reaching down into his pants with a rather important gesture) Here, son (He hands the boy the coin, but his eyes are di- rected to his wife's.

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU? BOBO Man ...

"I got me a dream," says Walter early in the play but his dream is not to be confused with Dr. King's.

Yet, with remark- able prescience, she saw history whole: Her play encom- passes everything from the rise of black nationalism in the United States and Africa to the advent of black militancy to the specific dimensions of the black woman's liberation movement.

All I can say is if this is my time in life MY TIME to say good-bye (And she builds with momentum as she starts to circle the room with an exuberant, almost tearfully happy release) to these Goddamned cracking walls!

But any attempt to con- fine the play to an era, a mind-set, an issue ("Housing") or set of topical concerns was, as we now see, a mistake.

This is also why Shake- A RAISIN IN THE SUN 11 speare deals with race (Othello), anti-Semitism (The Merchant of Venice), and feminism (The Taming of the Shrew) ; because these will be the continuing dilemmas of the bourgeois epoch!

She wipes her face with a moist cloth and runs her fingers through her sleep-disheveled hair in a vain effort and ties an apron around her housecoat.

Langston Hughes An Appreciation: A RAISIN IN THE SUN THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY By Frank Rich Chicago It was 25 years ago that a 28-year-old black woman from this city changed American theater forever with her first produced play.

For Scott has dug beneath the easy mis-seeing of the work as "soap opera," "stereotype," "well-made melodrama," and given us the emotional depths of these real people.

(She rises and gets the ironing board and sets it A RAISIN IN THE SUN 55 up and attacks a huge pile of rough-dried clothes, sprinkling them in preparation for the ironing and then rolling them into tight fat balls) WALTER (Mumbling) We one group of men tied to a race of women with small minds!

MAMA (To BENEATHA) Why you got to flit so from one thing to another, baby?

Picking on me is not going to make her give it to you to invest in any liquor stores (Underbreath, dropping into a chair) and I for one say, God bless Mama for that!

And here a table or a chair has been moved to disguise the worn places in the carpet; but the carpet has fought back by showing its weariness, with depressing uniformity, elsewhere on its surface.

JOHNSON (Nonplussed) You know, me and you ain't never agreed about some things, Lena Younger.

That is, she analyzes and assesses reality and shapes her statement as an aesthe- tically powerful and politically advanced work of art.

But Miss Hansberry's real drama is the battle for the soul and identity of Walter Lee Younger, the family's son, Walter, 35, is a chauffeur who wants to get rich by open- ing a liquor store.

The mad Macbeths, bestial Richard Ill's, and other feudal worthies are actually shown, like the whole class, as degenerate and degenerating.

On one level Walter Lee is merely aspiring to full and acknowl- edged humanity; on another level he yearns to strut his "manhood," a predictable mix of machismo and fantasy. 14 A RAISIN IN THE SUN But Hansberry takes it even further to show us that on still another level Walter Lee, worker though he be, has the "realizable" dream of the black petty bourgeoisie.

Walter Lee, fix your tie and tuck your shirt in, you look like somebody's hoodlum!

RUTH (Pearl Bailey) What kind of folks do that, honey?

But Miss Hansberry's real drama is the battle for the soul and identity of Walter Lee Younger, the family's son, Walter, 35, is a chauffeur who wants to get rich by open- ing a liquor store.

MAMA I ain't meddling (Underbreath; busy-bodyish) I just noticed all last week he had cold cereal, and when it starts getting this chilly in the fall a child ought to have some hot grits or something when he goes out in the cold A RAISIN IN THE SUN 41 RUTH (Furious) I gave him hot oats is that all right!

WALTER It ain't that nobody expects you to get on your knees and say thank you, Brother; thank you, Ruth; thank you, Mama and thank you, Travis, for wearing the same pair of shoes for two semesters BENEATHA (Dropping to her knees) Well I do all right? thank everybody!

Langston Hughes An Appreciation: A RAISIN IN THE SUN THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY By Frank Rich Chicago It was 25 years ago that a 28-year-old black woman from this city changed American theater forever with her first produced play.

He fumbles with his cap, starts to speak, clears throat, looks everywhere but at RUTH.

RUTH Walter honey, be glad MAMA (Still to his back, fingering things on the table) 'Course I don't want to make it sound fancier than it is ...

GEORGE (Offhand) Few times a year.

God knows there was plenty wrong with Walter Younger hard-headed, mean, kind of wild with women plenty wrong with him.

And she always saw the present and future in the light of the past clear back to the slavery of the Old 8 A RAISIN IN THE SUN South and the new slavery that followed for black workers who migrated to the industrial ghettos of the North.

He ain't hardly got in there good yet. 26 A RAISIN IN THE SUN WALTER (Wandering in, still more oriented to sleep than to a new day) Well, what was you doing all that yelling for if I can't even get in there yet?

(He is a gentle man; thoughtful and somewhat labored in his manner) It is one of these community organizations set up to look after oh, you know, things like block upkeep and special projects and we also have what we call our New Neighbors Orien- tation Committee .

She is no quaint, folksy artifact; she is truth, history, love and struggle as they can be manifest only in real life.

TRAVIS (With sullen politeness) Yes'm.

The mad Macbeths, bestial Richard Ill's, and other feudal worthies are actually shown, like the whole class, as degenerate and degenerating.

We thought Hansberry's play was part of the "passive resistance" phase of the movement, which was over the minute Malcolm's penetrating eyes and words began to charge through the media with deadly force.

George Thompson in Poetry and Marxism points out that drama is the most expressive artistic form to emerge out of great social transformation.

(Chuckling a little) A RAISIN IN THE SUN 45 Looks right dumpy today.

Moreover, a section of this room, for it is not really a room unto itself, though the landlord's lease would make it seem so, slopes backward to provide a small kitchen area, where the family prepares the meals that are eaten in the living room proper, which must also serve as dining room.

What makes Raisin so mov- ing is that Walter finally does rise above his misplaced values to find a new dignity and moral courage and that he does so with the support of his contentious but always loving family.

(WALTER'S voice has risen in pitch and hysterical promise and on the last line he lifts TRAVIS high) (Blackout) SCENE THREE Time: Saturday, moving day, one week later.

Without quite realizing it, he oppresses his wife, Ruth, a domestic, and mocks the ambitions of his 20-year-old sister, Beneatha, a fledgling activist and med- ical student.

(BENEATHA comes in, brushing her hair and look- ing up to the ceiling, where the sound of a vacuum cleaner has started up) BENEATHA What could be so dirty on that woman's rugs that she has to vacuum them every single day?

The New York Times Octobers, 1983 A Critical Re evaluation : A RAISIN IN THE SUN'S ENDURING PASSION By AmmBaraka In the wake of its twenty-fifth anniversary, Lorraine Hansberry's great play A Raisin in the Sun is enjoying a revival of a most encouraging kind.

Shakespeare is the artist of the destruction of feudalism and the emergence of capital- ism.

The role itself of family head, folksy counsel, up- holder of tradition has caused many people to see her as the stereotyped "black matriarch" of establishment and commercial sociological fame.

RUTH (Looking up from the stove to inspect him auto- matically) Come here.

He crosses to her and allows her to embrace him warmly but keeps his face fixed with masculine rigidity.

But that's not reality either, though his discussion of the dynamics and dialectics of revolution and of the continuity of human struggle, the only means of progress still rings with truth!

This is also why Shake- A RAISIN IN THE SUN 11 speare deals with race (Othello), anti-Semitism (The Merchant of Venice), and feminism (The Taming of the Shrew) ; because these will be the continuing dilemmas of the bourgeois epoch!

But any attempt to con- fine the play to an era, a mind-set, an issue ("Housing") or set of topical concerns was, as we now see, a mistake.

TRAVIS (Outraged) Gaaaleee!

In spite of all the other conversations and dis- tractions of the morning, this is what they have been waiting for, even TRAVIS, who looks help- lessly from his mother to his grandmother.

(A false cheerfulness, a beginning of something) I guess we all better stop moping around and get some work done.

The social materials that Hansberry so brilliantly shaped into drama are not lightweight.

An exception is George Murchison (merchant's son) , the "assimilated" good bourgeois whose boldest dream, if one can call it that, is to "get the grades ... to pass the course ... to get a degree" en route to making it the American way.

And as such this is the completion of a dream she and her late husband who has literally, like the slaves, been worked to death conceived together.

Course, there's a couple of hundred you got to pay so's you don't spend your life just waiting for them clowns to let your license get approved RUTH You mean graft?

Dialogue be- tween Beneatha and her mother, brother, Asagai and George Murchison digs into all these still-burning concerns.

Before the curtain rises, RUTH'S voice, a strident, dra- matic church alto, cuts through the silence.

Seeing Raisin again, one is struck by how much Miss Hansberry's pro- tagonist resembles those of other Chicago writers, from Dreiser's Sister Carrie to David Mamet's proletarian schemer in American Buffalo.

Its furnish- ings are typical and undistinguished and their primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years and they are tired.

But that's not reality either, though his discussion of the dynamics and dialectics of revolution and of the continuity of human struggle, the only means of progress still rings with truth!

BENEATHA (Angrily) Me! (MAMA and RUTH look at each other and burst into raucous laughter) Don't worry I don't expect you to understand.

Formalist artists must resort to all kinds of superficial aberrations of form because usually they have nothing to say.

Without quite realizing it, he oppresses his wife, Ruth, a domestic, and mocks the ambitions of his 20-year-old sister, Beneatha, a fledgling activist and med- ical student.

MAMA (Frightened at this telling) Well well it's out there in Clybourne Park (RUTH'S radiance jades abruptly, and WALTER finally turns slowly to face his mother with incre- dulity and hostility) A RAISIN IN THE SUN 93 RUTH Where?

The word "Man" has penetrated his consciousness; he mumbles it to himself repeatedly between strange agitated pauses as he moves about) 144 A RAISIN IN THE SUN MAMA Baby, how you going to feel on the inside?

Complete with restora- tions to the text of scenes and passages removed from the first production, the work is currently being given a new direction and interpretation that reveal even more clearly the play's profoundly imposing stature, continuing rel- evance, and pointed social analysis.

WALTER (Coming in from the bathroom and drawing a make-believe gun from a make-believe holster and shooting at his son) What is it he wants to do?

And she posed all her concerns in a work that portrayed a black family with a greater realism and complexity than had ever been previously seen on an American stage.

(There is silence following the remark as the three women react to the sense of it) Gee I didn't mean that, Ruth, honest.

LINDNER (More frustrated than annoyed) No, thank you very much.

It has broken or approached long-standing box office records and has been properly hailed as "a classic," while the Washington Post has called it succinctly: "one of the handful of great American dramas ... in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie" For a playwright who knows, too well, the vagaries and realities of American theater, this assessment is gratifying.

He crosses to her and allows her to embrace him warmly but keeps his face fixed with masculine rigidity.

She is, on the one hand, secure in the collegiate world of "ideas" and elitism, above the mass; on the other, undeceived by the myths and symbols of class and status.

Brother isn't really crazy yet he he's an elaborate neurotic.

He's he's so shallow.

Her aspiration is less caustic, more attainable than Walter's.

But they are kept ignorant enough not to understand that the real dimensions A RAISIN IN THE SUN 17 of that dream white supremacy, black "inferiority," and with them ultimately, though they know it not, fascism and war are revealed every day throughout the world as deadly to human life and development even their own.

It has broken or approached long-standing box office records and has been properly hailed as "a classic," while the Washington Post has called it succinctly: "one of the handful of great American dramas ... in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie" For a playwright who knows, too well, the vagaries and realities of American theater, this assessment is gratifying.

ASAGAI Why? BENEATHA (Bitterly) Because it doesn't seem deep enough, close enough to what ails mankind!

Complete with restora- tions to the text of scenes and passages removed from the first production, the work is currently being given a new direction and interpretation that reveal even more clearly the play's profoundly imposing stature, continuing rel- evance, and pointed social analysis.

He dances with RUTH some more and starts to laugh and stops and pantomimes someone over an operating table) I can just see that chick someday looking down at some poor cat on an operating table and before she starts to slice him, she says .

Part militant, part dilletante, "liberated" woman, little girl, she questions everything and dreams of service to humanity, an identity beyond self and family in the liberation struggles of her people.

She sets the headdress on haphazardly and then notices her hair again and clutches at it and then replaces the headdress and frowns at herself.

But it dealt with them not as abstractions, fit only for infantile-left pamphlets, but as they are lived.

(With a trill) 'Night. 104 A RAISIN IN THE SUN MAMA Good night, Mis' Johnson.

MAMA (Working her fingers in RUTH'S shoulders to relax her) She be all right.

We just plain working folks.

Shakespeare is the artist of the destruction of feudalism and the emergence of capital- ism.

(He does so; RUTH and BENNIE and MAMA watch him in frozen horror) "Cap- tain, Mistuh, Bossman (Groveling and grinning and wringing his hands in profoundly anguished imitation of the slow-witted movie stereotype) A-hee-hee-hee!

BENEATHA (Emerging grandly from the doorway so that we can see her thoroughly robed in the costume Asagai brought) You are looking at what a well-dressed Ni- gerian woman wears (She parades for RUTH, her hair completely hidden by the headdress; she is coquettish- ly fanning herself with an ornate oriental fan, mistak- enly more like Butterfly than any Nigerian that ever was) Isn't it beautiful?

Brother isn't really crazy yet he he's an elaborate neurotic.

Rich people don't have to be flashy . . . though I'll have to get something a little sportier for Ruth maybe a Cadillac convertible to do her shopping in.

Moreover, a section of this room, for it is not really a room unto itself, though the landlord's lease would make it seem so, slopes backward to provide a small kitchen area, where the family prepares the meals that are eaten in the living room proper, which must also serve as dining room.

She is already so- cially mobile, finding a place, as her family cannot, among other petty bourgeois aspirants on the rungs of "education," where their hard work has put her.

If he's ashamed of his heritage GEORGE Oh, don't be so proud of yourself, Bennie just because you look eccentric.

(She is counting off with doubt) Is that the right number of zeros.

It has broken or approached long-standing box office records and has been properly hailed as "a classic," while the Washington Post has called it succinctly: "one of the handful of great American dramas ... in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie" For a playwright who knows, too well, the vagaries and realities of American theater, this assessment is gratifying.

On one level Walter Lee is merely aspiring to full and acknowl- edged humanity; on another level he yearns to strut his "manhood," a predictable mix of machismo and fantasy. 14 A RAISIN IN THE SUN But Hansberry takes it even further to show us that on still another level Walter Lee, worker though he be, has the "realizable" dream of the black petty bourgeoisie.

For black theater artists and would-be theorists especially, this is ironic because the play is probably the most widely appreciated particularly by African Americans black drama that we have.

At major regional theaters in city after city Raisin has played to packed houses and, as on the night I saw it, standing ovations.

She asked blacks to reconsider how those dreams might be defined; she demanded that whites not impede the fulfill- ment of those dreams for one more second.

(He slides the briefcase and hat under the chair) And as I was saying I am from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association and we have had it brought to our attention at the last meet- ing that you people or at least your mother has bought a piece of residential property at (He digs for the slip of paper again) four o six Clybourne Street .

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Her statement cannot be separated from the characters she creates to embody, in their totality, the life she observes: it becomes, in short, the living material of the work, part of its breathing body, integral and alive.

When Raisin first appeared in 1959, the Civil Rights Movement was in its earlier stages.

As for myself, I want a nice (Groping) simple (Thoughtfully) sophisticated girl . . . not a poet O.K.? (He starts to kiss her, she rebuffs him again and he jumps up) BENEATHA Why are you angry, George?

MAMA (Smiling at him suddenly and relaxing and look- ing him over) How many miles is it from here to where you come from?

(She smiles happily at this clich6 of cliches) Everybody say it's got to do with them bombs and things they keep setting off.

And when he stands up at the finale and will not be beaten, we can cry with joy.

These are the categories Langston proposes for the dream: Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun?

He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties, inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment) WALTER Is he out yet?

Her statement cannot be separated from the characters she creates to embody, in their totality, the life she observes: it becomes, in short, the living material of the work, part of its breathing body, integral and alive.

All you have to do is just sit down with her when you drinking your coffee one morning and talking 'bout things like you do and (He sits down be- A RAISIN IN THE SUN 33 side her and demonstrates graphically what he thinks her methods and tone should be) you just sip your coffee, see, and say easy like that you been thinking 'bout that deal Walter Lee is so interested in, 'bout the store and all, and sip some more coffee, like what you saying ain't really that important to you And the ...

Women gets right depressed sometimes when they get her way.

Filling up your heads (Count- ing off on his fingers) with the sociology and the psychology but they teaching you how to be a man?

His happi- ness is deep in him; he cannot keep still with his new-found exuberance.

The role itself of family head, folksy counsel, up- holder of tradition has caused many people to see her as the stereotyped "black matriarch" of establishment and commercial sociological fame.

RUTH (Struck senseless with the news, in its various de- grees of goodness and trouble, she sits a moment, her fists propping her chin in thought, and then she starts to rise, bringing her fists down with vigor, the radiance spreading from cheek to cheek again) Well well!

(Coming to her with genuine ro- mantic flippancy) I will show you our mountains and our stars; and give you cool drinks from gourds and teach you the old songs and the ways of our people and, in time, we will pretend that (Very Softly) you have only been away for a day.

(He extends his hand for the fraternal clasp) GEORGE Black Brother, hell !

The silence shouts) Your wife A RAISIN IN THE SUN 75 say she going to destroy your child.

(Looking up at him) I dissected something that looked just like you yes- terday.

(He turns and faces his wife and watches her a moment at the stove, and then, suddenly) You look young this morning, baby.

He ain't hardly got in there good yet. 26 A RAISIN IN THE SUN WALTER (Wandering in, still more oriented to sleep than to a new day) Well, what was you doing all that yelling for if I can't even get in there yet?

She asked blacks to reconsider how those dreams might be defined; she demanded that whites not impede the fulfill- ment of those dreams for one more second.

WALTER (Feeling his head; sobriety coming) Where's Mama?

The little ferret man (played again tellingly by John Fiedler, one of the original cast on Broadway and in the film) is the dream's messenger, and the only white person in the play.

And she posed all her concerns in a work that portrayed a black family with a greater realism and complexity than had ever been previously seen on an American stage.

Her statement cannot be separated from the characters she creates to embody, in their totality, the life she observes: it becomes, in short, the living material of the work, part of its breathing body, integral and alive.

Don't you see there isn't any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us our own little mirage that we think is the future.

WALTER (With taut agitation now) What about the money you put in?

Yet, with remark- able prescience, she saw history whole: Her play encom- passes everything from the rise of black nationalism in the United States and Africa to the advent of black militancy to the specific dimensions of the black woman's liberation movement.

BENEATHA (With incredulity) You you sent all the way home for me?

The truth is that Hansberry's dramatic skills have yet to be properly appreciated and not just by those guardians of the status quo who pass themselves off as dramatic critics.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN 117 LINDNER (More encouraged by such affirmation) That we don't try hard enough in this world to understand the other fellow's problem.

And how those psychological projections of human life can come into conflict like any other product of that life.

The Younger famUy is the incarnation before they burst from the bloody Southern backroads and the burning streets of Watts and Newark onto TV screens and the world stage of our common ghetto-variey Fanny Lou Hamers, Malcolm X's, and Angela Davises.

All this unpacking and everything we got to do.

She is lost, vague, trying to catch hold, to make some sense of A RAISIN IN THE SUN 139 her former command of the world, but it still eludes her.

But in the contradiction between form and content, content must be the bottom line though unless the form be an extension of (and correctly serve) that content, obviously even understand- ing of the content will be flawed.

(BENEATHA enters, dressed for the evening in a cocktail dress and earrings, hair natural) GEORGE Well hey (Crosses to BENEATHA; thoughtful, with emphasis, since this is a reversal) You look great!

TRAVIS (The masculinity and gruff ness start to jade at last) Aw gaalee Mama ...

But in the contradiction between form and content, content must be the bottom line though unless the form be an extension of (and correctly serve) that content, obviously even understand- ing of the content will be flawed.

They are both quiet and tense for several seconds) A RAISIN IN THE SUN 29 TRAVIS (Presently) Could I maybe go carry some gro- ceries in front of the supermarket for a little while after school then?

Her aspiration is less caustic, more attainable than Walter's.

It isn't a circle it is simply a long line as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity.

But whether I go into business selling it to 'em is, and I don't want that on my ledger this late in life.

One done almost lost his mind thinking 'bout money all the time and the other done commence to talk about things I can't seem to under- stand in no form or fashion.

(RUTH folds over, near hysteria) MAMA (Worriedly hovering over RUTH) Ruth honey what's the matter with you you sick?

Both Clay and Richard are rebellious scions of the middle class.

(The boy finally turns around and rolls his eyes at her, knowing the mood has changed and he is vindicated; he does not, however, move toward her yet) Not for nothing in this world!

(WALTER has begun the trek out of the room, slowly and awkwardly, rather like a small boy, passing the back of his sleeve across his mouth from time to time) Life can really be so much simpler than people let it be most of the time.

On one level Walter Lee is merely aspiring to full and acknowl- edged humanity; on another level he yearns to strut his "manhood," a predictable mix of machismo and fantasy. 14 A RAISIN IN THE SUN But Hansberry takes it even further to show us that on still another level Walter Lee, worker though he be, has the "realizable" dream of the black petty bourgeoisie.

WALTER (Quietly) Sometimes it's like I can see the fu- ture stretched out in front of me just plain as day.

(Her son sits up at last, in a stupor of sleepiness) I say hurry up, Travis!

It has broken or approached long-standing box office records and has been properly hailed as "a classic," while the Washington Post has called it succinctly: "one of the handful of great American dramas ... in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie" For a playwright who knows, too well, the vagaries and realities of American theater, this assessment is gratifying.

TRAVIS Whoopee (He leaps up and clasps his father around the middle with his legs, and they face each other in mutual appreciation; slowly WALTER LEE peeks around the boy to catch the violent rays from his wife's eyes and draws his head back as if shot) WALTER You better get down now and get to school, man.

Her speech is a mixture of many things; it is different from the rest of the family's insofar as education has per- meated her sense of English and perhaps the Midwest rather than the South has finally at last won out in her inflection; but not altogether, be- cause over all of it is a soft slurring and trans- formed use of vowels which is the decided influ- ence of the Southside.

Similarly, the new interpreters of Walter Lee (James Pickens in New York, Delroy Lindo at Yale and in Wash- ington) are something "fresh," like our kids say.

(The glassy-eyed look melts and then she col- lapses into a fit of heavy sobbing.

On one level Walter Lee is merely aspiring to full and acknowl- edged humanity; on another level he yearns to strut his "manhood," a predictable mix of machismo and fantasy. 14 A RAISIN IN THE SUN But Hansberry takes it even further to show us that on still another level Walter Lee, worker though he be, has the "realizable" dream of the black petty bourgeoisie.

You see, this little liquor store we got in mind cost seventy-five thousand and we figured the initial investment on the place be 'bout thirty thousand, see.

He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties, inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment) WALTER Is he out yet?

They dip and she melts into his arms in a classic, body-melding "slow drag") BENEATHA (Regarding them a long time as they dance, then drawing in her breath for a deeply exaggerated comment which she does not particularly mean) Talk about oldddddddddd-fashioneddddddd Negroes!

(They ex- change glances) You don't think MAMA (With her sense of drama) Now I ain't saying what I think.

He dances with RUTH some more and starts to laugh and stops and pantomimes someone over an operating table) I can just see that chick someday looking down at some poor cat on an operating table and before she starts to slice him, she says .

Ain't many girls who decide WALTER and BENEATHA (In unison) "to be a doctor."

BENEATHA (Drily) Well if the salt loses its savor MAMA Now that will do.

He has done it by allowing the text to be heard, the boiling and lyrical words to strike home and be connected by the social actuality of real life impeccably rendered (and analyzed and criticized).

TRAVIS (Safely behind the bastion of MAMA) That's right look out, now!

I'm going to look that son-of-a-bitch in the eyes and say (He falters) and say, "All right, Mr. Lindner (He falters even more) that's your neighborhood out there!

"There he is Symbol of a Rising Class!

MAMA Did you get all them chores done already?

They are necessarily larger than life in impact but crafted meticulously from living social material When the play opened on Broadway, Lena Younger, the emotional adhesive of the family, was given a broad, aggressive reading by Claudia McNeil.

Well to get right to the point I (A great breath, and he is off at last) I am sure you people must be aware of some of the incidents which have happened in various parts of the city when colored people have moved into certain areas (BE- NEATHA exhales heavily and starts tossing a piece of fruit up and down in the air) Well because we have what I think is going to be a unique type of organiza- tion in American community life not only do we deplore that kind of thing but we are trying t...

(He stops short, struck dumb at the sight of the oblivious WALTER and RUTH) BENEATHA (Smoothing her hair with slight embarrass- ment) Oh yes, that's my mother.

And you know, biology is the greatest.

Yet, with remark- able prescience, she saw history whole: Her play encom- passes everything from the rise of black nationalism in the United States and Africa to the advent of black militancy to the specific dimensions of the black woman's liberation movement.

It isn't a circle it is simply a long line as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity.

All of Raisin's characters speak to the text and are critical to its dramatic tensions and understanding.

The baton was ready to pass from "George's father" as leader of the "Freedom Movement" (when its real muscle was always the Lena Youngers and their husbands) to the Walter Lees and Beneathas and Asagais and even the Georges.

We missed the essence of the work that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people.

A writer of un- limited compassion, Miss Hansberry believed that all people must be measured, as she put it, by both their "hills and valleys. 9 * Miss Hansberry, who died of cancer at the age of 34 in 1965, wrote Raisin well before the marches on Washing- ton, the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the inner-city explosions.

{She looks out of the window as she replaces the plant) Lord, ain't nothing as dreary as the view from this win- dow on a dreary day, is there?

{She looks out of the window as she replaces the plant) Lord, ain't nothing as dreary as the view from this win- dow on a dreary day, is there?

A writer of un- limited compassion, Miss Hansberry believed that all people must be measured, as she put it, by both their "hills and valleys. 9 * Miss Hansberry, who died of cancer at the age of 34 in 1965, wrote Raisin well before the marches on Washing- ton, the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the inner-city explosions.

(MAMA walks out of the room) RUTH (Almost gently, with profound understanding) You think you a woman, Bennie but you still a little girl.

He holds the envelope high above his head, like a little dancer, his face is radiant and he is breathless.

For black theater artists and would-be theorists especially, this is ironic because the play is probably the most widely appreciated particularly by African Americans black drama that we have.

BENEATHA (Still at the door, absently) Yes . . . we've all got acute ghetto-itus.

He ain't hardly got in there good yet. 26 A RAISIN IN THE SUN WALTER (Wandering in, still more oriented to sleep than to a new day) Well, what was you doing all that yelling for if I can't even get in there yet?

BENEATHA ignores the eccentricity of his actions and goes on with the monologue of insult) Did you dream of yachts on Lake Michigan, Brother?

The Younger family is part of the black majority, and the concerns I once dismissed as "middle class" buying a house and moving into "white folks' neighborhoods" are actually reflective of the essence of black people's 20 A RAISIN IN THE SUN striving and the will to defeat segregation, discrimination, and national oppression.

RUTH (Glad to add kindling) She's saying he's crazy.

They who might kill me even . . . actually replenish all that I was.

If we opponents of racism, sexism, and the degeneracies of capitalism today were to write Richard the Nix and Ronnie the Rex, we would not be called the Bard's heirs, although it is the bourgeoisie who came to shower celebration on Shakespeare now they provide sterile, dead productions to hide the real texts.

TRAVIS Whoopee (He leaps up and clasps his father around the middle with his legs, and they face each other in mutual appreciation; slowly WALTER LEE peeks around the boy to catch the violent rays from his wife's eyes and draws his head back as if shot) WALTER You better get down now and get to school, man.

RUTH Oh, Walter WALTER (An irritable mimic) Oh, Walter!

BENEATHA You're evading.

I mean we figured it out, me and Willy and Bobo.

MAMA Travis you run to the hardware and get me some string cord.

That is, she analyzes and assesses reality and shapes her statement as an aesthe- tically powerful and politically advanced work of art.

WALTER continues, prodding) Ruth made up the note read it ...

Yet, with remark- able prescience, she saw history whole: Her play encom- passes everything from the rise of black nationalism in the United States and Africa to the advent of black militancy to the specific dimensions of the black woman's liberation movement.

(She laughs joyously, having practically destroyed the apartment, and flings her arms up and lets them come down happily, slowly, reflectively, over her abdomen, aware for the first time perhaps that the life therein pulses with hap- piness and not despair) Lena?

BENEATHA (Giggling fiercely) Travis we were trying to make Mania Mrs. Miniver not Scarlett O'Hara!

For Raisin typifies American society in a way that re- flects more accurately the real lives of the black U.S. majority than any work that ever received commercial exposure before it, and few if any since.

Does he pay tuition?

This here can is empty as Jacob's kettle.

Her dark-brown face is surrounded by the total whiteness of her hair, and, being a woman who has adjusted to many things in life and over- come many more, her face is full of strength.

As the music, soulful and sensuous, comes up he dances over to RUTH and tries to get her to dance with him.

But that's not reality either, though his discussion of the dynamics and dialectics of revolution and of the continuity of human struggle, the only means of progress still rings with truth!

Without quite realizing it, he oppresses his wife, Ruth, a domestic, and mocks the ambitions of his 20-year-old sister, Beneatha, a fledgling activist and med- ical student.

And she always saw the present and future in the light of the past clear back to the slavery of the Old 8 A RAISIN IN THE SUN South and the new slavery that followed for black workers who migrated to the industrial ghettos of the North.

The Younger famUy is the incarnation before they burst from the bloody Southern backroads and the burning streets of Watts and Newark onto TV screens and the world stage of our common ghetto-variey Fanny Lou Hamers, Malcolm X's, and Angela Davises.

GEORGE Oh, it's just a college girl's way of calling people Uncle Toms but that isn't what it means at all.

(She promenades to the radio and, with an arrogant flourish, turns off the good loud blues that is playing) Enough of this assimilationist junk!

RUTH (Glad to add kindling) She's saying he's crazy.

The truth is that Hansberry's dramatic skills have yet to be properly appreciated and not just by those guardians of the status quo who pass themselves off as dramatic critics.

(WALTER gets his bathroom utensils and flies out to the bathroom) RUTH Sit down and have your breakfast, Travis.

On one level Walter Lee is merely aspiring to full and acknowl- edged humanity; on another level he yearns to strut his "manhood," a predictable mix of machismo and fantasy. 14 A RAISIN IN THE SUN But Hansberry takes it even further to show us that on still another level Walter Lee, worker though he be, has the "realizable" dream of the black petty bourgeoisie.

And here a table or a chair has been moved to disguise the worn places in the carpet; but the carpet has fought back by showing its weariness, with depressing uniformity, elsewhere on its surface.

As they work, the radio is on and a Southside disk-jockey pro- gram is inappropriately filling the house with a rather exotic saxophone blues.

You done wrote his epitaph too like the rest of the world?

(And now the lighting shifts subtly to suggest the world of WALTER'S imagination, and the mood shifts from pure comedy.

(RUTH is pushing her through the door) The Ashanti were performing surgical opera- tions when the English (RUTH pulls the door to, with BENEATHA on the other side, and smiles graciously at GEORGE.

The single window that has been provided for these "two" rooms is located in this kitchen area.