Fifty years later, 'Raisin' still reverberates

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, currently showing through May 1st at New Brunswick's Crossroads Theatre Company, is at once a snapshot of a significant moment in American history and a slice of the everyday working-class life of the Younger clan, a family living in a run-down tenement in Chicago in the early 1950s.

The production, which brings out the timelessness of the play and sometimes seems that it could have been written yesterday, captures the internal and external struggles of an African American family trying to find its piece of the American dream.

The play opens as each member of the Younger family – matriarch Lena, daughter Beneatha, son and daughter-in-law Walter and Ruth, and grandchild Travis – has had the fires of his or her imagination lit by the match of a $10,000 insurance check set to arrive the following morning. Each member of the family has envisioned spending the money, but none so fervently as Walter, who sees the cash as a way to give up his demeaning chauffeur’s job and enter into the middle class.

 

The check, life insurance from Lena’s husband, arrives and Lena does what she thinks is best for her family. She buys the family the “best house she can find for the money,” a house planted firmly in a white neighborhood. But by investing in her own dream, Lena inadvertently destroys Walter’s.

 

The themes on which Hansberry touches are almost dizzying in their breadth and depth. Integration and racism are at the core of the play’s central conflict. But the playwright also dissects ideas about beauty and the existence of a god, about class struggle and assimilation and she does so with dialogue that dips and leaps and shuffles and runs like poetry.

Although Walter, with his neediness and desperation, is the squeakiest of the family’s wheels, it is daughter Beneatha who is the beating heart of the play and perhaps the closest in temperament to Hansberry herself. In Beneatha, Hansberry explores the chasm between the re-discovery and celebration of African roots and the desire to achieve and prosper in America.

A college student with the almost unimaginable dream of attending medical school, Beneatha waivers between two beaus who represent the two worlds to which she is drawn. George is the scion of a successful African American family who attends college as if it is a trade school – learn the materials, take the test, pass the course, get the degree, move on without reflection. He sees in Beneatha the kind of woman who would be able to move in his assimilated world, taking care that her hair and clothes wouldn’t attract undue attention and raising polite, well-spoken children. The other is Asagai, a Nigerian who exhorts her to let her hair down, literally and figuratively, urging her to follow him home to Africa.

Vichelle Jones’ Beneatha embodies Hansberry’s vision of the future: she dreams big and is prepared to leapfrog over her mother, brother and sister-in-law, all of whom work as domestics, into a brave new world that may or may not be ready to accept her as a doctor. Jones’ Beneatha is at once idealistic and despairing, hopeful and untrusting. She is drawn to Asagai’s optimism but still tied to George’s familiarity.

 

Also notable in the cast are Irungu Mutu and Chantal Jean-Pierre. Mutu, as Asagai, has a perspective on the Youngers’ life that they cannot possess. He almost effervesces on stage and brings with him a buoyancy that seems to be its own light source. He draws Beneatha to him without guile by asking her to be exactly who she is. And Jean-Pierre, as Walter’s wife Ruth, is the family member who is at once the most cynical and the most invested in the idea, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, that if you work hard, keep your head down and don’t make trouble, you are entitled to a small piece of the American dream.

 

The Crossroads production of A Raisin in the Sun is both a solid and reflective production of a play that chronicles a singular story with universal themes. Theatergoers familiar only with the drastically-edited 1961 movie will be interested in the play’s broad themes and intensity.

A Raisin in the Sun runs through April 30th at Crossroads Theatre Company on Livingston Avenue. Contact the box office at (732) 545-8100, or visit www.crossroadstheatrecompany.org, for tickets or more information.