Today is the anniversary of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which opened at the Barrymore Theatre in New York City on March 11th, 1959. Hansberry’s “Raisin” was the first play written by a black woman to be performed on the Broadway stage.
Hansberry, who was born May 19, 1930 in Chicago, died young, at age 35, on January 12, 1965, from pancreatic cancer. She was eulogized by many at her funeral in Harlem and the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” sung by Nina Simone, who was a close friend was composed in her memory.
I don’t mean to imply here that Hansberry was the first black female playwright. For that history suggest you read “Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America” by Elizabeth Brown Guillory. Margaret Walker Alexander wrote in the foreword to Guillory’s book:
Elizabeth Brown-Guillory has accomplished three major tasks in this very important and absorbing book. She has first of all given an historical overview of black women playwrights in this twentieth century; second, she has analyzed and assessed the works of three major examples: Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ntozake Shange; and third, she has given some objective thought to the general structure and criticism of drama as a whole, with particular emphasis on black drama.
…It is good to remember that American drama has really come of age in the twentieth century, that plays on the American stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were really little more than glorified minstrels, farces, and melodramas. Eugene O’Neill is the first great name in the Hall of American Playwrights and following him there may be about a half dozen great names: Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman. So it is not surprising that black theater in America had its real beginnings with the Harlem Renaissance, and in that famous group at least four women wrote plays. They were May Miller, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Angelina Weld Grimke. Since Johnson was the most successful of these four, with her Plumes ( 1927) appearing off-Broadway, Brown-Guillory chooses her as her first example, showing the tradition out of which subsequent black women playwrights have come.
We’ve written about Hansberry’s life at Black Kos in the past, exploring her family history and the role they played in housing desegregation.
Many of you are too young to have seen the first production on Broadway, which starred Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, Lonne Elder, John Fiedler and Ed Hall, but you may have seen the film in which most of the original Broadway cast starred in 1961.
Since the first production there have been numerous versions and revivals.
Now the newest hits the Broadway stage, scheduled to open with Denzel Washington in the starring role of Walter Younger.
Here’s a clip of interviews with the cast:
ABC news host Robin Roberts interviewed Denzel on Good Morning America recently.
The show opens April 3, 2014 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where it opened originally. It is now in previews.
I’m going to scrape together my pennies and go.
Cross-posted from Black Kos
7 comments