Black History Month: first play by a black woman on Broadway, has been artfully revived by company making its new home in multicultural Oxford
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
A Raisin in the Sun
at the Oxford Playhouse
from Wednesday, October 2 to Saturday 5
Review by JON LEWIS
Chicago Hope
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a black woman on Broadway, has been artfully revived by Tinuke Craig for Headlong Theatre C. It’s a play that inspired Bruce Norris’ 2010 Pulitzer and Tony-winning drama Clybourne Park that toured to the Playhouse in 2016 with both plays depicting social change and upward mobility within Chicago’s African-American community.
Set in a rented apartment in Chicago’s South Side, the Younger family is expecting their lives to change when the matriarch, Lena (Doreene Blackstock) receives a life insurance cheque for $10,000. Lena’s son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel) is a chauffeur with a drink problem, a wife, Ruth (Cash Holand) who works as a domestic cleaner with dreams of family improvement, and unreliable potential business partners. He wants to spend the money on a liquor store.
A Raisin in the Sun, an image mentioned in the first speech, is likened to a dream deferred. When Lena buys a new house for the family in Clybourne Park, a white neighbourhood, and trusts Walter to divide the rest of the money in trust funds for himself and to pay the medical school fees of his sister Beneatha (Joséphine-Fransilja Brookman). Walter’s dreams of enrichment and a good life are intended to be deferred.
Walter, of course, squanders the money, dissolving into an alcoholic fug. His poor judgement is contrasted with the attitudes of two of Beneatha’s university friends. One, the rich, snobbish George (Gilbert Kyem Jr), is the man Walter wished to be: wealthy like the white folk. The other, a bright Nigerian Yoruba villager, Joseph (Kenneth Omole) dreams of his role in his country’s civic and economic development, wanting Beneatha to join him in his task.
An official from Clybourne Park’s ironically-named ‘welcoming committee’ revives for Lena family memories of fears of lynchings and stories of crop-picking slavery. Her strong leadership forces Walter to confront his failings and to reaffirm the Younger family’s sense of pride in himself and his ethnicity. A Raisin in the Sun is a powerfully performed statement from a company making its new home in multicultural Oxford.
