Raisin in the Sun

The show is open!

Geva’s production of A Raisin in the Sun opened on Saturday, Feb 25, after 5 preview performances. Every single time I watch the performance, I find myself hoping that it will come out differently this time. Hoping that generosity and not greed will rule the choices of the characters we see onstage, as well as the characters we just hear about. Hoping that somehow history will re-write itself over the course of the play, and that joy will be the overriding emotion. Alas, that never happens, and the play goes on, just as Lorraine Hansberry wrote it – a reflection of our not too distant past.  I learn something new every though, which gives me hope. If I, who have seen this show, both in rehearsal and performance, so many times, learn something new each time, then I have hope that audiences gain something new as well.

On opening night, the phrase that gave me pause was a line of Asagai’s (played by Tyrien Andre Obahnjoko) in the second act. As we know, without giving any major plot points away, the play hinges on the decision about what the family will do with the insurance money from the death of the Big Walter.  And by this point in the play, it is safe to say that things are not going well for the Younger family.  Asagai says to Beneatha (played by Jessica Frances Dukes) “Isn’t there something wrong in a house – in a world – where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man?” On opening night, that line struck me as full of both condemnation and inspiration. And as I think about the many leaders – in the Civil Rights movement especially – whose deaths have cut short the realization of their dreams, that line makes my breath catch.

I look forward to seeing you in the theatre – and to hearing your thoughts! A Raisin in the Sun runs at Geva through March 25.

And at Geva…

Having sketched out a little bit of the historical context, I want to take a brief break and give you an inside glimpse at what Geva Theatre Center‘s production of A Raisin in the Sun will look like.  The production, directed by Robert O’Hara, will have set and costumes designed by Clint Ramos, lighting by Japhy Weideman and sound by Lindsay Jones. Our first rehearsal isn’t until next week, but the set designs have been submitted and our scene shop is in the process of building.

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.

On the South Side

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.

Courage and Honesty

Contemporary productions of classic dramas often try to capture something of the essence of the original production.  As a dramaturg, I want to know how audiences and critics responded to earlier productions of the plays I work on, to better inform my work and give me the ability to offer an historical perspective.  So one of the first questions I asked myself in preparing for the rehearsal period was:  In 1959, when A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway, what were the reactions?

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

How much do you know about Lorraine Hansberry?

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)..

Welcome to Geva Journal!

Welcome to Geva Journal, a new place for conversations about the work at Geva Theatre Center, inRochester, NY. My name is Jenni Werner, and I’m the director of literary and artistic programs here at Geva.  This is my first season here, so I’m learning new things about Geva, Rochester and the five county area almost every day.  Here on this blog, we’ll talk about the artistic process of creating the work on Geva’s stages – and maybe about some of the work that you never see, the conversations in our conference rooms and rehearsal hall.  I won’t be the only blogger, but I’ll be your host here on Geva Journal, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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.