Towards the beginning of rehearsals, I read a great article by Kai Wright on The Root. The article began like this: “The thing about history is that you don’t get answers to questions you don’t ask.” It’s a fantastic point – and it really sums up my work as a dramaturg in the rehearsal hall. I spend my time asking questions, finding new ways to ask questions, and working very hard every day to find new questions to ask of the play, of the playwright, of the director and the cast.

But Wright’s point is that Lorraine Hansberry is viewed the world over for her contributions to theatre and literature and specifically for her influence on the stories presented about African Americans. But unless you dig, you will not find a discussion about her sexuality and its impact on her work, on her life and on her political activity.

It’s hard to know for sure if Lorraine Hansberry would have identified herself as a lesbian – labels like that are far more defined now, and actually seem to have taken on a new importance, given the current politics of the country. Hansberry was married, for a brief time, to a man – Robert Nemiroff – who is responsible in many ways for the continued visibility of her work. (He was the executor of her estate, and is one of the authors of the musical, Raisin, as well as the 25th Anniversary script of the play and the multiple incarnations of her story, To Be Young, Gifted and Black.) However, she dated women and belonged to the lesbian political organization Daughters of Bilitis, which was the first of its kind.

In 1961, she wrote an unpublished letter to the editor of ONE magazine. “I have suspected for a good time that the homosexual in America would ultimately pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment of women… Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.”

As this extremely talented cast heads downstairs into the theatre to take the play one step closer to public presentation, I can’t help but think about how timely these words are today, and how indebted we are to Lorraine Hansberry for her expression of her forward-thinking ideas onstage. I only wish that, as a society, we could more fully accept her complete identity, for it is from that identity that works like A Raisin in the Sun spring.

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?

I’ve known of this poem for years, but had only ever thought of it in connection with this play – what I hadn’t realized was that it was just one of a series of poems on the topic Hughes wrote, called Montage of a Dream Deferred. I am not a poet, nor am I a scholar of poetry, so I’m not going to analyze them, but I do want to share a few – they resonate throughout the play, and as we go into the rehearsal room each day, I find that the resonance grows stronger. What is the consequence of deferring your dreams? When does the desperation and the frustration kick in?

Dream Boogie
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -

You think
It’s a happy beat? 

Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
Something underneath
Like a -

What did I say?

Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!

Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!

Y-e-a-h! 

Tell Me
Why should it be my loneliness,
Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong?

Deferred
This year, maybe, do you think I can graduate?
I’m already two years late.
Dropped out six months when I was seven,
At a year when I was eleven,
Then got put back when we come North.
To get through high at twenty’s kind of late -
But maybe this year I can graduate.

Maybe now I can have that white enamel stove
I dreamed about when we first fell in love
Eighteen years ago.
But you know,
Rooming and everything
Then kids,
Cold-water flat and all that.
But now my daughter’s married
And my boy’s most grown -
Quit school to work -
And where we’re moving
There ain’t no stove -
Maybe I can buy that white enamel stove!

Me, I always did want to study French.
It don’t make sense –
I’ll never go to France,
But night schools teach French.
Now at last I’ve got a job
Where I get off at five,
In time to wash and dress,
So, s’il vous plait, I’ll study French!

Someday,
I’m gonna buy two new suits
At once!

All I want is
One more bottle of gin.

All I want is to see
My furniture paid for.

All I want is a wife who will
Work with me and not against me. Say,
Baby, could you see your way clear?

Heaven, heaven, is my home!
This world I’ll leave behind.
When I set my feet in glory
I’ll have a throne for mine!

I want to pass the civil service.

I want a television set.

You know, as old as I am,
I ain’t never
Owned a decent radio yet?

I’d like to take up Bach.

Montage
Of a dream
Deferred.

Buddy, have you heard?

So, how do we know what is intended? We go back to the dialogue. Robert has actually deleted many of the stage directions, and we let the dialogue dictate the action. In many productions of A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth spends a great deal of time ironing – she has taken laundry home from the white houses she works in, washed it at home, and irons it during many scenes in the play. Was this business, invented to keep the actress onstage, or is it driven by the dialogue? We can only know what the text teaches us.  Will you see Ruth, in the Geva production, continuously ironing clothes? Only time will tell…

Oh – and last night, after rehearsal, I caught The Good Wife on CBS – and wouldn’t you know it? Lynda Gravatt, who plays Mama in our production, was on the show!

Robert and Clint were both really impacted by the images of Chicago’s Southside in the 1950′s, which brings to light a side of A Raisin in the Sun that isn’t often fully depicted onstage – the visceral desperation that the Youngers deal with throughout the play. This family – Mama, Walter Lee, Ruth, Travis, Beneatha and (until his death sometime before the play) Big Walter – have been living in a tight, crumbling one-bedroom kitchenette apartment for over 30 years. As the family grew, the living space became more and more cramped, and the privacy dwindled until it was practically nonexistent. With the family living literally right on top of each other and the absolute absence of breathing space, tensions rose until, as Walter says to Ruth, “How we gets to the place where we scared to talk softness to each other. Why you think it got to be like that? Ruth, what is it gets into people ought to be close?”

According to Clint, this feeling of desperation and the horrible state of most apartment buildings in the Southside was the starting place for the design. He wanted to create “a space so cramped and desperate that moving out really becomes a life and death situation.”

Clint Ramo's model

So he has created a space that leaves no room for romance, no room to imagine that this space could possibly have anything but a negative impact on the Younger family. What does a space so small do to a family?

Personally, as I look at this space and try putting myself in the shoes of any of the characters in the script, I feel my chest constrict with hopelessness and frustration. It reminds me of something Lorraine Hansberry wrote in a letter to a young college student who wanted to know her views on Civil Rights, or, as he put it, “the Negro question.” As part of her response, she said, “In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe: and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.” This is not the point of her reply – but it hits on the head one of the problems with a space like this. There is not even room to breathe.

Existence in Chicago’s South Side in the 1950′s was harsh.  Discriminatory housing policies meant that the majority of African American families lived like the Youngers, in kitchenette apartments – larger apartments were broken up into several smaller homes, with a very small kitchen and one bedroom.  Entire families lived in these apartments, and usually shared a bathroom in the hallway with others on the floor.

Breaking up apartments like this allowed landlords – like Carl Hansberry, Lorraine’s father – to greatly increase the income they gained from their buildings.  And the more people they fit into their buildings, the more crowded the South Side became. In 2003, Timuel Black interviewed residents of the South Side from the 50′s, as a way of capturing the oral history of the area.  One recalled, “It was so crowded because back then all of us were moving all the time! First white folks moved out, then black folks would move in. We even had something called “Moving Day,” which was in September and sometimes also in April. That’s when the white folks would be leaving and the black folks would be coming in. It was kind of prestigious to do that because our community was constantly expanding, and we were always moving farther south.”

With overcrowding came an increase in the poor conditions.  And because Federal Housing Authority policies actually encouraged discriminatory lending policies, very few African American families were able to secure the loans necessary to move out of the neighborhood, even if they were prepared for the uphill battle against racism they might receive in another area. So the South Side began more and more to look like this:

This is what the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun is fighting so hard to get out of – overcrowded spaces both inside and outside of their apartment walls, which are crumbling around them. What happens when a family – or a whole city full of families – is pushed to the brink like this, where even getting up in the morning involves a fight with those around you?

This post is a summary of a some research into the South Side – for more thorough information, and an in-depth look at the discriminatory housing policies mentioned, I recommend: 

• Black, Timuel D. Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration. Evanston: Northwest University Press, 2003.
• Miller, Wayne F. Chicago’s South Side: 1946-1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd., 2000.
• Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Clearly, the show was well received – it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Columbia Pictures immediately requested a screenplay from her for the film version of the play, which was released just two years later.

Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in the 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun

Brooks Atkinson, then the critic for the New York Times, reported, “The play is honest.  She has told the inner as well as the outer truth about a Negro family in the Southside of Chicago at the present time. Since the performance is also honest and since Sidney Poitier is a candid actor, A Raisin in the Sun has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it…That is Miss Hansberry’s personal contribution to an explosive situation in which simple honesty is the most difficult thing in the world. And also the most illuminating.”

But beyond critics, what were the reactions?  Years later in a theoretical journal, Douglas Turner Ward claimed “It is Walter Lee – flawed, contradictory, irascible, impulsive, furious and, most of all, desperate – who emerges as the most unique creation for his time and ours.  It is his behavior throughout the play – his restless impatience, his discontent with the way things are, his acute perception of societal disparities, his fury at status inequities, his refusal to accept his ‘place’ – which gives the play prophetic significance, for these traits are not embodied in an exceptional prototype but are the properties of an average person, a typical member of the broad black majority.  Most of the 1959 audience, encountering this anger within such a prevalent type, felt threatened.  He made them uneasy; he raised unsettling doubts; he was difficult to identify with.  Where would all this raging frustration lead? Despite his fixation with America’s pragmatism and dreams of success, he was, in his energy, an omen.  That energy was soon to erupt into American reality with a vengeance.”

And what of the play’s impact on the field of theatre? Immeasurable.  Woodie King, Jr., artistic director of the New Federal Theatre and a pioneering African American theatre artist, concurred.  ”A Raisin in the Sun opened doors within my consciousness that I never knew existed.  Here is was in Detroit’s Cass Theatre, a young man who had never seen anywhere a black man express all the things I felt but never had the courage to express – and in a theatre full of black and white people, no less!…The power of the play had made us all aware of our uniqueness as Blacks and had…confirmed that our dreams were possible…The effect all this had on the current crop of black artists is tremendous…To mention all of the artists whose careers were enhanced by their encounters with Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun would read like a Who’s Who in the black theatre.”

So clearly, a production today needs to capture that honesty, the sincere glimpse into a family struggling against the inequities of 1950′s America.  It needs to make us feel uneasy, as we witness Walter Lee’s rage and its impact on his family.  We need to understand the vital necessity of all that followed in the Civil Rights movement – and by extension, the struggles of any group of people to be treated humanely. And it if we succeed, we too will be inspired by the courage of the Younger family to stand up and fight.

Lorraine Hansberry

As a theatre artist, I’ve always known that she was the author of A Raisin in the Sun, of course, and of the film version of the play, as well as a couple of other rarely produced plays.  I knew that this made her the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.  I knew that the play was slightly autobiographical – although Hansberry’s family was fairly well off, her family moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950′s, and faced the kind of violence and racism that the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun are afraid of.  And I knew that she died very young, losing a battle to cancer at the age of 34.

But I didn’t know much about her life beyond those few tidbits.

Her own words, at a 1959 conference called “The Negro Writer and His Roots,” speak to her history far more compellingly than anything I might hope to compile:

“I was born on the Southside of Chicago.  I was born black and a female.  I was born in a depression after one world war, and came into adolescence during another. While I was still in my teens the first atom bombs were dropped on human beings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and by the time I was twenty-three years old my government and that of the Soviet Union had entered actively into the worst conflict of nerves in human history – the Cold War.

I have lost friends and relatives through cancer, lynching and war. I have been personally the victim of physical attack which was the offspring of racial and political hysteria. I have worked with the handicapped and seen the ravages of congenital diseases that we have not yet conquered because we spend our time and ingenuity in far less purposeful wars. I see daily on the streets of New York, street gangs and prostitutes and beggars; I have, like all of you, on a thousand occasions seen indescribable displays of man’s very real inhumanity to man; and I have come to maturity, as we all must, knowing that greed and malice, indifference to human misery and perhaps, above all else, ignorance – the prime ancient and persistent enemy of man – abound in this world.

I say all of this to say that one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and react to the miseries which afflict this world.

I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life – but, rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny, and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars…”

From To be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (adapted by Robert Nemiroff)..

My background is in dramaturgy.  As a dramaturg, my main responsibility is to help paint a full picture of the world being created onstage.  Dramaturgs do this for artists primarily by sharing information about the context of the world – the historical, biographical and social background. And we do this for audiences by creating opportunities to more fully engage in the world of the play – through lobby displays, articles online and in print, and conversations.  And we ask questions.  Lots and lots of questions.

I’m working, as we speak, on preparing to serve as the production dramaturg for our production of A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, directed by Robert O’Hara, and for the next couple of months, this blog will follow our creative process.