A Raisin in the Sun
New York critics in 1959 acclaimed Lorraine Hansberry’s classic as the Best Play of the Year. Only 29, she was the youngest playwright and at that time the first Afro-American to win the award.
Hansberry died just six years later, but in her short prolific career A Raisin in the Sun is the masterpiece which has been constantly restaged (and filmed twice) in the US, but never seen in Australia. And that’s a big miss – for a 63-year-old play which ranks with the best of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in this Afro-American take on the American Dream.
If the excuse here was the challenge of finding an expert, near all black cast, then this premiere production by Wesley Enoch (and developed by Shari Sebbens) certainly buries that old one.
It’s the 1950s, in a well-kept but decrepit Chicago apartment, where the Younger family await their futures following the workplace death of the patriarch, and an insurance payout which never seems to come. Today it does.
The son Walter, a limo driver, dreams of starting a liquor shop, his sassy smart sister Beneatha needs college fees to pursue being a doctor, their mother Lena wants to buy a cheap house in a white outer suburb, while Ruth snaps at Walter while struggling to keep the family fed and together.
Other characters like the wealthy snob courting Beneatha (Leinad Walker) and his competition, a Nigerian activist (Adolphus Waylee), and the incorrigible if comic neighbour (Nancy Denis) and even young Travis (Ibrahima Yade) flesh out the play’s kaleidoscope of concerns.
This is no treatise; all Hansberry’s characters empathetically speak to bigger things because they speak so specifically from their time and place. Historic generational differences of how to survive, dream and win in a white man’s world; pride and self-delusion; tyrannies arising from anti-colonial activism in Africa; feminism, and what’s God got to do with it, are all here. Not forgetting the polite racism from the visiting head of the welcoming committee who wants to keep their neighbourhood white (Jacob Warner).
Zahra Newman is exquisite as Ruth, so troubled in her stillness; Bert Labonte desperately cajoling as Walter – especially when practising his slave-style fawning to the white visitor; Gayle Samuels as his bossy mother fosters great love and humour in this fractured family; and as young Beneatha, Angela Mahlatjie delights in what is her mainstage debut.
Mel Page’s costuming and styling are as rich in period detail as her wide domestic set, lit through varying moods by Varity Hampson. Wesley Enoch directs a pacy production while still allowing heart-felt revelations of character from this remarkable cast.
This is a timeless classic worth finally catching up with.
Martin Portus
Photographer: Joseph Mayers
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