45 Years Ago, a 'Raisin' to Cheer
Revival of Hansberry Play Stirs Memories of a Racial Milestone
The Washington Post

There was nothing like it on Broadway, which made it all the more powerful and beautiful and mesmerizing and tender. A great billowing curtain had been thrown back on a whole people, a whole race. The whole production had a leaping, antic, ferocious quality to it, as if the playwright planned to split something wide open, right in front of that first-night audience.

"Mama," the playwright wrote to her mother during a tryout run in New Haven, Conn., "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."

When the curtain fell, when the applause became deafening, when the lead actor leaped offstage and grabbed the young playwright, the theater critics rushed out to write about something they had rarely been given a chance to write about before -- race, black people, a living and breathing family with colored skin right there on a Broadway stage.

The play was "A Raisin in the Sun." Its impact on an artistic level had a power like Brown v. Board of Education or Jackie Robinson. It was a moment in theatrical history both epic and serene. The playwright was Lorraine Hansberry. She was all of 28 years old, and she carried her genius like someone holding a candle: She just glowed. The lead actor was Sidney Poitier, who had a few small movies to his credit at the time.

It premiered March 11, 1959 and is about to have its first Broadway revival, with previews starting Tuesday. The date of that first show is important for what it wasn't: It wasn't yet the '60s. It was the '50s, the Cold War, a segregated America. The big protests were a ways off yet. No one could yet see around the corner. So things, right then, were both simple and not so simple: Factory work was a reliable paycheck, milkmen stepped out of trucks in the morning, the ladies with the colored skin gliding into those fine Manhattan apartment buildings were the maids.

To be a black actor dreaming of Broadway was a mighty leap of the imagination then. Colored entertainers who got ink in newspapers were mostly singers -- Nat King Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles. Colored actors were rare.

And yet "Raisin" would win the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best American play of the season. Hansberry would become the first black to receive the honor, and the youngest woman. The play would become a classic, mentioned in the same breath as works by Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller. Now comes the much-anticipated revival at the Royale Theater. It will star Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, hip-hop guru Sean Combs (in the role made unforgettable by Poitier), Sanaa Lathan and Phylicia Rashad.

Yet, to appreciate the galvanizing effect of "A Raisin in the Sun," it helps to understand what led up to that moment in 1959 when the curtain opened at the Barrymore Theater. The powers of the New York theatrical world didn't know Lloyd Richards, the director, or Philip Rose and David J. Cogan, the producers. Nor did they know anything of Lorraine Hansberry of Chicago.

"We were all new, and no one had opened their arms to welcome us," says Richards.

"No one was doing black plays then," recalls Rose. "And what few were being done were done in the basement of black churches."

A Tentative Start
The first Broadway production by a black playwright, "Appearances" by onetime bellhop Garland Anderson, had a brief run in 1925. Other plays by Negro dramatists would arrive sporadically: Langston Hughes's "Mulatto" opened in 1935, "Take a Giant Step" by Louis Peterson in 1953. But their runs were relatively short and the plays failed to galvanize public attention.

The handful of black actors who appeared on Broadway probably felt a lot like Bert Williams, a vaudeville performer who appeared with the Ziegfeld Follies in 1910. The company was all white, save for Williams, who appeared in blackface. "I'm in the right church, but the wrong pew," he used to say, and everyone laughed.

Hansberry had arrived in New York City in the early 1950s. She came from a middle-class family that made money in real estate. Her parents dreamed of her becoming a doctor. She wanted to write. She had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, where she had gone to study painting. In New York she got intermittent work writing for avant-garde journals, such as Freedom, which she characterized as a journal of "Negro liberation." She did a lot of waitressing. No one believed she would waitress forever.

"When I first met Lorraine," recalls Billie Allen, now a New York theatrical director who was an understudy in the original "Raisin," "she was, like, wired. You could feel the currents coming out of her. Such an exciting person -- and gorgeous."

In 1952 Hansberry was waitressing at a family summer camp 90 miles outside of New York City. "Raisin" producer Rose, who was working there as a singer, recalled one dinner: "There was a waitress at my table. I took note of her because she was a very attractive black woman. I later went up to her and said, 'You're a terrible waitress and you should find another career.' That's how we met."

The two formed a friendship once back in Manhattan.

Rose was born in New York City. "I lived in what you might call a Jewish ghetto, the Lower East Side," he says. He moved to Washington when he was 16 and not long thereafter got a job at Marvin's Department Store as a bill collector. The job took him into the black neighborhoods of the nation's capital. The experience seared him. "I had never met black people before. When I returned to New York, I went straight to Harlem and started singing jazz." He also got involved with job discrimination protests and showed up on picket lines.

He had never met anyone like Hansberry. They'd spend hours talking about justice and art. "She wanted to be a writer," says Rose. "But nothing much was happening. She was told, 'You can't write about black people. Nobody's going to read that.' She wrote a play about three white girls in the Village. It was beautiful writing, but there was no passion in it."

She hungered to see blacks on the stage, so they went to a church production. Walking along a Manhattan street after seeing the play, Hansberry turned to Rose. "I can write a better play than that," she said. "I said, 'Well, why don't you then?' "

One day in the mid-'50s, she asked Rose to come to her apartment. She said it was a dinner party. In reality, she finally had the confidence to start sharing her play, reading it aloud. "She read it for me and three other people who were there," Rose recalls. "She read about half of the play. I left at 2 in the morning." He couldn't sleep. The play had seeped inside of him. "I woke her at 7 the next morning -- she said she'd never forgive me for that -- and said, 'I want to produce your play.' She thought I meant I was going to do it in a church or something."
A Classic Takes Shape
"A Raisin in the Sun" is about a family on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. They are about to receive a financial windfall from the life insurance company -- $10,000 -- after the death of their father. The money sets loose a torrent of emotions. Mama wants to use the money to move into a white neighborhood. Her children are wary, wondering what integration will take out of their dreams: the son who wants to invest in a liquor store, the daughter who wants to pay for medical school. The play is about other things as well, namely race and humanity and pride and what happens when a young man twitches volcanically about a home and opportunity and the seduction of money. The two central characters were Walter Lee Younger (Poitier) and his mother, Mama (Claudia McNeil).

Billie Allen had first heard about the play in 1958 while living on Long Island. Allen read for the part of Beneatha, the rebellious younger sister (an autobiographical Hansberry) of Walter Lee. (Allen hadn't told the producers she was pregnant at the reading. The role would eventually go to Diana Sands, with Allen becoming her understudy.) The thrill of reading Hansberry's untitled play for the first time hasn't left Allen in all these years: "I was so excited that there was this opportunity to present this family. We had 'Grapes of Wrath' and 'Long Day's Journey Into Night.' But we didn't have anything about us."

Lloyd Richards, born in Canada, raised in Detroit, had a few New York stage roles to his credit by the early 1950s. He also was teaching acting classes and sometimes Poitier would be in them.

"One day we were leaving class," Richards recalls, "and Sidney said, 'Lloyd, if I ever get my hands on a good play, I want you to direct it.' You appreciate hearing something like that, but I just took it as a manifestation of our friendship."

The phone rang in 1957 at Richards's apartment. It was Poitier.

He had a copy of Hansberry's play -- "A Raisin in the Sun," the title taken from Langston Hughes's remarkable poem "A Dream Deferred":

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

. . . Or does it explode?

It was, by both Richards and Poitier's estimation, a wonderful play, but it was unfinished. Like most plays by new playwrights, it needed work.

"I used to meet with Lorraine once a week to work on the play," says Richards. "When I first read it, it was a play centered around Mama. Lorraine had already been told her play should be centered around Walter Lee. And I confirmed that. I spent a year with her working on that."

Walter Lee was the man who, without his dream of spending Mama's money on a harebrained scheme to get a liquor store, just might wither and harden. Like a raisin in the sun.

As Hansberry fine-tuned her play, though, the producers were becoming desperate.

"We couldn't get a theater," recalls Rose. "I was turned down by every theater owner in New York."

He was raising money, $10 here, $15 there, all from friends. They thought they were merely contributing to his civil rights passion. Bless, Phil; here comes Phil, give him a few bucks. "They never expected to get any of it back," Rose says.

The theatrical power brokers listened, but he could tell they lacked interest. "The theater owners were concerned that there would be no black audience. Black people couldn't afford theater for the most part -- and there was nothing on Broadway that would interest them. The other side of the coin was the producers felt if they did get the black audiences, then they felt the white audiences would stay away."

He needed $100,000. He had raised only $20,000. Still, he announced rehearsals would begin a month later, in September 1959. Then came a fire on the set of a movie Poitier was filming in Hollywood. That postponed things. Which actually served to be a kind of blessing, as it gave Rose more time to raise more money.

He finally received a call from Kermit Bloomgarden, a powerful Broadway producer. (Among his credits were "The Diary of Anne Frank," "The Crucible" and "Death of a Salesman.") Rose and Hansberry went to meet with Bloomgarden. He said he would put up the money but demanded two things: That he be given the right to fire Richards, the director, at any time, and that they immediately replace Claudia McNeil with singer Ethel Waters, whom he believed was a bigger star. Hansberry and Rose sat bewildered. Bloomgarden gave them a couple of days to decide. "He was sure we were going to accept," says Rose.

Hansberry and Rose talked and talked over coffee, both feeling dejected. Hansberry went home to her apartment. "She called me," Rose says, "and said, 'Look, when I first met you, we were going to do it in a church. So let's go ahead and do it that way.' "

Rose finally took the production to New Haven for a tryout run, then afterward to Philadelphia. From Philadelphia they were to go to New York -- but still had no theater and not enough money.

"That could have been the end of 'Raisin' right then and there," says Rose.

A break came when Johnny Shubert, of the powerful Shuberts who owned the New York theater chain, came to Philadelphia. "He saw that the audience was mixed, whites and blacks," says Rose. "He came to me and said, 'We'll give you the Barrymore Theater. But I can't give it to you for five weeks,' " recalls Rose. "So we had to go to Chicago. In Chicago, we got raves." (There was also a bizarre occurrence in Chicago: An arrest warrant was issued for Hansberry, whose father was accused of being a slumlord; his daughter's name was linked to the accusations. She left Chicago before the play opened there.)

There was still tinkering to be done. During one of the out-of-town tryouts, Richards noticed that McNeil was getting more applause than Poitier. That was a clue to him that the play was still weighted too heavily toward the Mama character. "We had to bring Sidney's part up in the play, where it belonged," says Richards.

The desperation and the uncertainties helped unite the cast. Emotions burned like leaves. "The feeling was we have got to help this young black woman and the producers and Ruby [Dee, who played Walter Lee's wife] and Sidney," recalls Billie Allen. "It is our duty to get this up and running."

A Glittering Comet
Walter Lee Younger, and his dream, from "Raisin":

"Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs. Man say: I got to take hold of this here world, baby! And a woman will say: Eat your eggs and go to work. Man say: I got to change my life, I'm choking to death, baby! And his woman say -- Your eggs is getting cold!"

Walter Lee is but a chauffeur. But what he could be with $10,000! He wants a liquor store. His mother wants a mightier dream, a home in a white section of town.

But after his mother has made the down payment, Walter Lee takes the remainder of the money, makes a foolhardy decision, and loses it to a scam artist.

A white man wants to give the family money not to move into the neighborhood. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, a Negro, a broken man living under one roof with his wife and mother and son and sister, now must watch his family watch him -- either take the money, or relocate his dignity.

From "Raisin":

Walter (starting to cry and facing the man eye to eye): "What I am telling you is that we called you over here to tell you that we are very proud and that this is -- this is my son, who makes the sixth generation of our family in this country, and that we have all thought about your offer and we have decided to move into our house because my father -- my father -- he earned it."

(Mama has her eyes closed and is rocking back and forth as though she were in church, with her head nodding the amen yes.)

"We don't want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes -- but we will try to be good neighbors. That's all we got to say. (He looks the man absolutely in the eyes.) We don't want your money."

Walter Lee chooses integration -- demands it! -- over acquiescence. This before the '60s and all that word would come to mean.

Rose remembers standing at the back of the theater on opening night and feeling something unique, magical, had begun to happen. Billie Allen felt similar sensations. "It was absolutely the most amazing moment I ever witnessed," she recalls. "You were in the eye of some great wash, a great event. You realized something was happening here, some molecules are being split." Her eyes went from Poitier to Hansberry to the audience, over and over again. "We were stomping and screaming. This young woman's eyes," Allen says of Hansberry, "were like glistening black diamonds."

As for Hansberry herself, "she was scared," recalls Rose. "She said, 'I want to go home.' She didn't know what the reviews were going to be."

Hansberry stepped out into an alley adjoining the theater. A crowd was waiting, among them James Baldwin, who had left Harlem and America for Paris and freedom and had returned to see Hansberry's play. In that alley there were noise and salutes and chilly weather suddenly made warm by the jubilation. People wanted autographs. Hansberry handed Baldwin her purse to hold. He handed her a pen.

Rose had gotten a limo and he insisted they go to Sardi's, the theatrical hangout, always a stop on opening night. Hansberry fussed all the way over. Still, she glowed. They stepped out of the limo, and the door to Sardi's opened. "When we got inside Sardi's, customers, waiters, all stood up for a long time, bowing to her," remembers Rose. "It was largely a white audience. That was when you realized it was more than just a play."

The critics were effusive.

"She has told the inner as well as the outer truths about a Negro family in Chicago," wrote Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times. "The play has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it."

"One of the most stirring and revealing productions of the year," said Newsweek.

"The relaxed, freewheeling interplay of a magnificent team of Negro actors drew me unresisting into a world of their making, their suffering, their thinking, and their rejoicing," wrote Kenneth Tynan in the New Yorker.

There were some remarkable plays on Broadway that season, among them Tennessee Williams's "Sweet Bird of Youth," and Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet." But it was Hansberry's drama that would receive the New York Drama Critics Circle award. The play was nominated for four Tony Awards, but didn't win any.

Still, it was a drama that opened the whole of America, at least those willing to troop over to the Barrymore Theater, to black life.

Richards knew theater had changed. "A white couple said to me, 'I have never been in a black person's home, and now you have permitted me to go into that home,' " Richards recalls. "It was also very important for black audiences because they could go see themselves onstage. A reflection. That was the gap it filled."

Baldwin realized the galvanizing power of the moment. "What is relevant here," he would write in an introduction to Hansberry's memoir "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," "is that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them. But, in 'Raisin,' black people recognized that house and all the people in it -- the mother, the son, the daughter and the daughter-in-law, and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the house but by their knowledge of the streets."

For a while, the life of Lorraine Hansberry continued to glitter. Like everyone, she was propelled through the looking glass of the '60s. She jousted with politicians about the slow pace of civil rights. She continued to write, was taken with the idea of a play about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. She thought of moving to Europe. She wanted to get to Big Sur. And then came the cancer. "And this Spring I shall -- what?" she mused toward the end. "Maybe go see the California coast -- maybe go to Scotland? And 1965? I will be 35 then -- grayer -- but still alive?"

She was like a glittering comet whose time was brief. She died Jan. 12, 1965. A mere 34 years old. Her "Raisin" had entered the canon.

The Afterlife
Two years after "Raisin" premiered in 1959, Ossie Davis (married to "Raisin" actress Ruby Dee) had his "Purlie Victorious" mounted on the Great White Way (also produced by Rose). Two years after Davis's debut, Langston Hughes's "Tambourines to Glory" had its Broadway premiere. James Baldwin's "Blues for Mister Charlie" (starring Billie Allen) arrived in 1964. That same year Hansberry's other Broadway offering opened, "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," a play about the struggles of an intellectual. (Its characters were white, and Hansberry seemed to be sending word forth that she would write about the whole of humanity.) In 1965, there was Baldwin yet again, with "The Amen Corner."

Five Broadway productions in the six years after the debut of "Raisin." All seemed to have found a soaring cultural pride. They would begin the process of threading Negro history into American history. "Raisin" said to theatrical producers that dramas with black casts could be commercial, could cross over to white audiences. (Hansberry's drama became an acclaimed film in 1961, featuring, among others, Poitier, McNeil, Sands and Dee, all from the original Broadway cast.)

The offspring of the "Raisin" juggernaut became quite mighty.

Richards would become the first black to direct major shows on television. He would also discover another playwright, August Wilson, and return to Broadway directing Wilson's plays. Lou Gossett, who played George, Beneatha's boyfriend in the original "Raisin," would go on to a motion picture career and win an Oscar. Douglas Turner Ward, also a member of the original "Raisin" cast, would become a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company.

"Raisin" is now taught in schools and performed regularly in regional theaters. "It's been accepted that it changed American theater," says Rose, who still travels and lectures widely about the play. "It's the most amazing thing to me when I travel to different colleges and see how many young black actors come to me and say that 'Raisin' was their seed. It also did the same thing for young black playwrights."

The play was revived as a musical on Broadway -- and called, simply, "Raisin" -- in 1973, but it has never, until now, been revived in the dramatic version in which it was originally presented.

"The saddest thing," says Rose, "is that Lorraine does not know what happened to her play."

Toward the end, the writer of "A Raisin in the Sun" was spotted on the streets of Manhattan, carrying her manual typewriter under her arms, going to her hospital appointments.

In her brief life she had found the right church, the right pew.

But she continued to be annoyed by things. Especially unrealized dreams. Things that might wither in the sun.

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