|
(1) Produced in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s
play, A Raisin in the Sun, was a
quietly revolutionary work that depicted African-American life in a fresh, new,
and realistic way. The play made her the youngest American, the first
African-American, and the fifth woman to win the New York Drama Critic’s
Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. In 1961, it was produced as a film
starring Sydney Poitier and has since become a
classic, providing encouragement for an entire generation of African-American
writers.
(2)
Hansberry was not only an artist but also a
political activist and the daughter of activists. Born in Chicago in 1930, she was a member of a
prominent family devoted to civil rights. Her father was a successful
real-estate broker, who won an anti-segregation case before the Illinois
Supreme Court in the mid-1930s, and her uncle was a Harvard professor. In her
home, Hansberry was privileged to meet many
influential cultural and intellectual leaders. Among them were artists and
activists such as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and
Langston Hughes.
(3)
The success of A Raisin in the Sun
helped gain an audience for her passionate views on social justice. It
mirrors one of Hansberry’s central artistic efforts, that of freeing many people from the smothering
effects of stereotyping by depicting the wide array of personality
types and aspirations that exist within one Southside Chicago family. A Raisin in the Sun was followed by
another play, produced in 1964, The
Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. This play is
about an intellectual in Greenwich Village, New York City, a man who is open-minded
and generous of spirit who, as Hansberry wrote,
“cares about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.”
(4) Lorraine Hansberry
died on the final day of the play’s run on Broadway. Her early death, at the
age of 34, was unfortunate, as it cut short a brilliant and promising career,
one that, even in its short span, changed the face of American theater. After
her death, however, her influence continued to be felt. A dramatic adaptation
of her autobiography, To Be Young,
Gifted, and Black, consisted of vignettes based on Hansberry’s
plays, poems, and other writings. It was produced Off-Broadway in 1969 and
appeared in book form the following year. Her play, Les Blancs, a drama set in Africa, was produced in 1970; and A Raisin in the Sun was adapted as a
musical, Raisin, and won a Tony
award in 1973.
(5) Even after her death, her dramatic works
have helped gain an audience for her essays and speeches on wide-ranging
topics, from world peace to the evils of the mistreatment of minorities, no
matter what their race, and especially for her works on the civil-rights
struggle and on the effort by Africans to be free of colonial rule. She was a
woman, much like the characters in her best-known play, who was determined to
be free of racial, cultural, or gender-based constraints.
|
