Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” may or may not be a great play, but it’s a profoundly fair one. When it was first produced, in 1959, Amiri Baraka’s radical Black Arts movement had yet to be born, but historically significant companies, such as the Negro Theatre Unit at the Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem—where the young Orson Welles first staged his legendary all-black “Macbeth”—had already produced work that was political and message-driven. Indeed, any number of black playwrights, from William Wells Brown to Alice Childress, had expressed similar ideas: about the corrupting power of the white world and the sick sham at the heart of any black American’s dream of racial integration. Hansberry was an integrationist—she married the Jewish songwriter Robert Nemiroff, whom she met while protesting New York University’s then all-white basketball team—but she also knew the toll the struggle could take. She had grown up in Chicago, the daughter of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate developer who was behind the 1940 Hansberry v. Lee case, contesting a city covenant that barred blacks from buying homes in a white neighborhood. But, even after the Supreme Court decided in Hansberry’s favor, he questioned his family’s ability to survive the nation’s racism and began scouting for a home in Mexico. While there, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage; he was fifty years old.
As in another iconic family drama, Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” the father in “A Raisin in the Sun” exists only in memory, but a great deal of the action pivots on his absence. “Big” Walter Younger has been dead for years, but the pain of his loss still haunts his family, and us, in part because he was that rare thing in contemporary American literature: a black man who stayed. It is his example—his steadfastness and commitment—that his only son, Walter, recognizes as his true birthright. Walter, a poor chauffeur, lives in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment on the South Side of Chicago, with his wife, Ruth, his ten-year-old son, Travis, his younger sister, Beneatha, and their widowed mother, Lena. It’s the kind of closed space where promise settles for a while, and then dies. Lena’s ambivalence about her son—Is he my husband or Ruth’s? Or is he a child, still? If I let him grow up, will he leave me, too?—exacerbates Walter’s largely uncommunicable sense of guilt at not being able to take care of the family as his father would have: not only is he unable to give his boy all he needs but he’s jealous and fretful with Beneatha, who’s studying to become a doctor and will likely end up much more at ease in the world. (Sometimes Walter looks at her as if she were acting “dicty,” or white.) Walter is a deeply political, lonely figure. Hansberry’s radicalism lay in giving a man like him language and making him go the course.
Like that other story about an existential black man in Chicago—Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son”—Kenny Leon’s revival of “Raisin” (at the Barrymore) opens with the sound of an alarm clock. The loud brrrriiiiiiinngg is like a call to arms. It’s time to wake up, but to what? The only person awake, when the curtain rises, is Ruth (Sophie Okonedo). She stands in darkness as sunlight oozes through the kitchen window. Wrapped in an old robe, her hair disturbingly plastic-looking (the unfortunate wigs in this production are the work of Mia M. Neal), Ruth wipes away some tears before rousing Travis (Bryce Clyde Jenkins), who is asleep on the couch. The living room is his bedroom, and his bathroom is one the Youngers share with other neighbors in their tired tenement. As Ruth hounds Travis to get ready for school and cooks Walter (Denzel Washington) breakfast before work, she tries to shut out the unpredictable, including Walter’s talk about his aspirations. Responding to it might tip her over into feeling things that she doesn’t want—or can’t afford—to feel. But Walter resents her unwillingness to entertain his dreams:
Things have to change, and they may soon. Tomorrow, Saturday, Walter’s father’s life-insurance payout will arrive: ten thousand dollars that will help Walter open his own liquor store and make him feel, unequivocally, that he’s the head of the household. Power is money. But not for Lena (LaTanya Richardson Jackson): she’s more interested in values—moral and otherwise. With her graying hair and her formidable presence, Lena is an embodiment of the 1922 Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son”: “Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair . . . / But all the time / I’se been a-climbin’ on, . . . / And turnin’ corners, / And sometimes goin’ in the dark.” Lena represents what black Americans used to call the “old country”—the American South—while Beneatha (gorgeously inhabited by Anika Noni Rose) lives in the New World, in which blacks look for their roots in Pan-Africanism. It’s Walter who has no home. He grew up in the shadow of Booker T. Washington’s dream of assimilation, but it hasn’t come true: the American dream is white, and Walter is locked out of any sort of belief structure at all. Ruth, a pragmatist and a realist, knows that her love for Walter will take a beating because Walter has been beat. She is the chorus for the family she married into; she comments on their actions with vexed, often amused wisdom, but also with an open heart.
The British-born Okonedo has trouble with Ruth’s language at first; sometimes she sounds Texan. (I blame Leon for this: for some reason, he has all the actors speak very quickly during the first half of the show, as if they were in a Bette Davis Warner Bros. picture from the thirties. Perhaps he wanted us to see how people who live so close together finish not just one another’s sentences but one another’s thoughts. It doesn’t work.) Okonedo tries to turn her sweet, dimpled face into a mask of resignation, to hood her eyes with bitterness, but she evinces so much natural optimism that we don’t quite believe her performance until the second act, when Lena reveals that she has used some of the insurance money to buy the family a new home—in Clybourne Park, a white section of town. This announcement acts as a kind of release: now Ruth can tell us what she’s been dreaming of—departure:
Ruth’s relief includes Walter, of course. “Be glad, honey,” she tells him sweetly, as if beckoning a lover across a bridge of hope, but Walter can’t hear it: he hears only his rage and disappointment at not being able to start a business of his own or have a life that he can control: the white man rules him at work, and Mama rules him at home. So when Lena says to him, “Son—you—you—understand what I done, don’t you?,” it sticks in his craw, and in ours, too: part of parenting is allowing your children to make their own mistakes—and fortunes. To atone for her betrayal, Lena hands Walter the balance of the money—sixty-five hundred dollars—with the understanding that some of it will be put away for Beneatha’s education and the rest will go toward his store. But Walter sinks it all into a bum business with a cheap chiseller, and crushes everyone’s hopes in the process. When a white emissary from Clybourne Park (David Cromer, who is appropriately jumpy as he brutalizes the family with a smile that’s anything but) offers Walter a good sum of money not to move his family there, he decides to take it. Walter is confirming what the white world has thought all along: that he can be bought, and so can his descendants.
Like the characters in Seán O’Casey’s 1924 play “Juno and the Paycock”—Hansberry admired O’Casey and other Irish “protest” writers—the Youngers are waiting for a dream to materialize in the form of a check. But what happens to a dream deferred, as Hughes asked in his famous poem, from which Hansberry took her title? Does it fester and die? Hansberry is evenhanded: she doesn’t make Walter a villain; she just gives him villainous thoughts. (Even when he tries to be a nefarious capitalist, he bungles it.) And it’s the need to play on two levels simultaneously—to be inwardly sensitive and outwardly cruel—that opens Washington up to his ambition as an actor. To become a star as a black man in Hollywood, Washington had to outwit all the money people who said that black actors wouldn’t sell overseas; at the same time, he refused to be canonized as the great black hope—a post-Billy Dee Williams matinée idol. He put that wiliness to work in his 2001 Oscar-winning performance as a murderous cop in “Training Day,” and, again, in his Tony-winning performance as a self-deluding adulterer in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s “Fences.” In both roles, he was sexy because his body told us that he didn’t give a fuck. What did he have to lose? He was an embattled black man in an indifferent world.
The stage revitalizes Washington. What can get too set in film—his bad-boy swagger, the questioning eyes that sometimes cut themselves off from his characters’ vulnerability—is dislodged by the moment-to-moment vicissitudes of theatre. You can see him react to the audience’s shifts in attention without ever losing his concentration. Some people have complained that Washington, at fifty-nine, is too old to play the thirty-five-year-old Walter, but I don’t agree: actors know from powerlessness. And black actors know it better. With his wide-legged, gunslinger stance, Washington helps cast the sanctimony out of the role; his vitality and his humor suggest an awareness of the criticisms that have been levelled at “Raisin” ’s “naturalism,” in such brilliant response plays as George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” (1986) and Robert O’Hara’s “Etiquette of Vigilance” (2010). Watching Washington is like watching a great actor at the start of his career: free and joyous, in love with words. He is learning to represent not his race but his history, the grit and cunning he needed to survive. When Walter leaves the stage at the end of the play, it’s with Mama in his arms and something ominous in his heart: the revenge fantasy that inhabits all American men of color who get to live this life long enough. ♦
