LORRAINE HANSBERRY

A Raisin in the Sun

A Raisin in the Sun

Introduction

Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun" was way ahead of its time as representing the black people's daily life in a way that everyone can understand and discuss the oppression of black people still felt despite progress had been made to civil rights. In 1957, when Lorraine Hansberry began work on A Raisin in the Sun, she titled it Crystal Stair, taken from a line in a Langston Hughes poem, “Mother to Son” (Bloom, 2009). The final title, like the original one, also comes from a Hughes poem, “Harlem,” which asks the question, “What happens to a dream deferred/ Does it dry up like a raisin in the Sun?” Either title is appropriate, for certainly this is a play about a mother-son relationship, but it is no less a play about dreams, dreams too long deferred. These unfulfilled dreams are at the center of the play and are the source of the varied problems in the play. The manner in which Hansberry presents these problems and the skill with which she weaves them into the basic theme of the work attest the artistry of the playwright.

Critical Context

The single most important achievement in African American theater in the 1950's was the production of Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. It was first produced Off-Broadway, in New Haven, Connecticut, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because it rejected by Broadway producers as being “too unlike the typical Broadway play” and because of the perceived lack of interest in African American family life. When it did open on Broadway; however, it received exceptional reviews and ran through 530 performances (Bobo, 2001). Since its Broadway production, it has attracted the widest viewing audience of any play by an African American.

The play performed by both professional and amateur groups all over the United States, in large cities and small towns, on college campuses and in community centers. It has also been reproduced on film and videocassette. It widely anthologized in high school and university textbooks and published singly in hardcover and inexpensive paperback volumes. Because of this wide accessibility, it is fair to speculate that most Americans, even if they have not read or seen the play, at least know about it.

Most critics would argue, however, that A Raisin in the Sun attests the artistry of Hansberry in being able to explore, in the lives of the Younger family, myth structures and styles formerly ignored by dramatists, especially African American dramatists. They would also concur that the skill with which she interweaves the various themes of work into a homogeneous whole is testimony to her skill in dramaturgy (Hansberry, 2011). Finally, critics agree that the universality of the themes and the variety of social issues raised in the play give A Raisin in the Sun lasting appeal.

Themes and Meanings

A Raisin in the Sun is rife with conflicts: generational conflicts, gender conflicts, ideological conflicts, and perhaps most important, conflicts of dreams, which are at the center of the ...