The boy named Travis is asleep on the couch. Bodies occupy almost every available space in the cramped apartment. The bathroom is way down the hall. The sound and sights of Chicago’s roiling South Side, circa the late 1950s, can be heard and felt outside.
Even as you walk into the Court Theatre, you know that the director Gabrielle Randle-Bent and her designer, Andrew Boyce, understand “A Raisin in the Sun,” the greatest play ever written by a Chicagoan about the city of her youth.
This cannot be taken for granted. Many productions, including the most recent Broadway revival, have shorn this play from its Chicago roots, seemingly forgetting the references to Walter Lee Younger standing at the corner of 39th and South Park, or even that it was based on Lorraine Hansberry’s own father’s decision to try and move his family into Washington Park, a white neighborhood in 1938. Carl Augustus Hansberry’s act of rebellion had a lot to do with a subsequent 1940 Supreme Court decision involving a covenant restricting Black families from purchasing or leasing land in a particular Chicago neighborhood such as the one to which the elder Hansberry aspired. When his daughter Lorraine, as formidable an artist and intellectual as Chicago ever produced, wrote “Raisin,” her dad, who became so disillusioned with America he had gone to Mexico, already was dead. Maybe that is how she injected so much passion and intensity into her masterpiece about an ordinary, hard-working Black family who just want to move to an affordable home that just happens to be in a white neighborhood.
To my mind, “Raisin” is the poetic and structural equal of any American play of the 20th century.
“A Raisin in the Sun” was first seen in Chicago (prior to New York) at the Blackstone Theatre in 1959 with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeill and Sidney Poitier. This newspaper’s Claudia Cassidy called it “a remarkable play” with a “proud backbone” and sent it on its way, even though Hansberry’s diaries indicate she had been terrified of the Tribune review. Court Theatre is the closest professional American theater to the setting of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and one of this Hyde Park theater’s most memorable moments came when a 2006 staging of the musical version, “Raisin,” intersected with the rise of Barack Obama, something Hansberry certainly could not have anticipated.
So there is a lot of local history. “A Raisin in the Sun” is best known as a play about the characters’ desire to move to a white neighborhood and, indeed, that’s the choice around which Hansberry structured her work. But one of the great pleasures of this revival is now well it teases out the other aspects of a work that offered an incomparably rich portrait of Black life in Chicago in the middle of the 20th century.
Hansberry once told Chicago’s Studs Terkel she split herself in two in the play: one half of her is Ruth Younger (here, the magnificent Kierra Bunch, body pulsing with stress and empathy), the wife of Walter Lee Younger (Brian Keys, like a coiled spring) who wants nothing so much as air to breathe for her family and who understands that holding that together is what matters most in the world. Hansberry’s other, more radical side is found in the “college girl” Beneatha (Martasia Jones, whose live-wire performance peers forward to the 1960s), torn between two lovers, Joseph Asagai (Eliott Johnson) and George (a droll Charles Gardner), one offering African rebirth, the other a pathway to Chicago’s Black middle class.
Simply put, Hansberry baked into her play most of the concerns of Black Chicago at the time, whether that was fighting off Chicago-style racism, often most perniciously expressed through real estate restrictions; the struggles of Black men to assert themselves within matriarchal families; economic repression all around and even the glimmers of a nascent civil rights movement. It’s all here and, in this production, all living and breathing before your eyes in the home of Lena Younger, played by Shanésia Davis, who understands the demands of this role because she understands Mama is the flawed but resilient leader of a roiling ensemble, a Chicago family, ordinary, extraordinary.
Randle-Bent has choreographed this production with great style. Pacing sags a little toward the end, which is generally less detailed than the near-flawless Act 1 (I suspect rehearsal time got shorter) and occasionally she goes a little far, adding to the running time of what already is a substantial work.
But those are very minor quibbles in what is the best show of the young year here so far, a richly staged, moving and superbly cast, designed, and acted rendition of an incomparably precious work to Chicago. It’s not to be missed, even if you think you already know the play.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “A Raisin in the Sun” (4 stars)
When: Through March 9
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes
Tickets: at $58-$100 at 773-753-4472 and courttheatre.org
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