THEATER; A Landmark Lesson in Being Black
By MICHAEL ANDERSON
Published: March 7, 1999
THEY had never seen anything like it. The theater critics, hurrying down the aisles under the pressure of
deadline, paused at the rear of the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The date was March 11, 1959. For a few
moments they stopped considering the words with which they would salute this poetically named play, ''A
Raisin in the Sun.'' Instead, they watched the first-night audience deliver its own verdict: on its feet and
willing to applaud, it seemed, for eternity. The cast took its curtain calls -- as the applause engulfed the
theater. The stage manager opened and closed the curtain. The director, Lloyd Richards, joined his players,
but the ovations swelled ever louder and more insistent: ''Author! Author! Author!''
Finally, Mr. Poitier (lead actor) descended to a fourth-row aisle seat, where the 28-year-old playwright sat,
thrilled rigid at the reception of her first produced play. On the arm of her leading man, Lorraine Hansberry
took the stage. ''It was as if the audience that night uniquely understood that they had not just seen a play
but had attended a historical event,'' the play's co-producer, Philip Rose, said recently, reminiscing about
the opening on the eve of its 40th anniversary this Thursday. In that remarkable theatrical season of 195859, Broadway had seen Tennessee Williams's ''Sweet Bird of Youth,'' ''A Touch of the Poet'' by Eugene
O'Neill, and Archibald MacLeish's ''J.B.” But until that evening, Broadway had never seen a play written
by a black woman, nor a play with a black director, nor a commercially produced drama about black life,
rather than musicals or comedy. The Broadway premiere of ''A Raisin in the Sun'' was as much a milestone
in the nation's social history as it was in American theater. ''Never before,'' commented James Baldwin,
''had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen onstage.''
Hansberry's story -- about the black Younger family's decision to risk moving from their ''rat-trap'' on the
South Side of Chicago to a three-bedroom house in an all-white neighborhood -- interwove prescient
observations about identity, feminism and personal ethics. Unlike the wooden ''problem plays'' about blacks
that preceded it, ''A Raisin in the Sun'' seemed steeped in human drama. The cruelties of racism -- ''What
happens to a dream deferred/ Does it dry up/ Like a raisin in the sun?'' in the words of the Langston Hughes
poem that gave the play its title -- are illuminated through the dynamics of conflict and love between
mother and son, husband and wife, brother and sister.
Kenneth Tynan remarked in his review of ''A Raisin in the Sun'' in The New Yorker that ''a play is not an
entity in itself, it is a part of history.'' In that sense, the presence of the play on Broadway appeared to be a
triumph of determined idealism for those involved. The 1960's would see productions of ''The Blacks,'' the
drama by Jean Genet about racism, as well as works by the black playwrights LeRoi Jones (later Amiri
Baraka) and Ed Bullins. Lonne Elder would go on to write the acclaimed 1969 play ''Ceremonies in Dark
Old Men.'' But in the 1950's, before the acclaim that greeted ''A Raisin in the Sun,'' ''Broadway was not
ready for a play about a black family,'' Mr. Richards, the director, said. What Broadway knew about black
people, Hansberry once told a reporter, involved ''cardboard characters, cute dialect bits, or hip-swinging
musicals from exotic scores.'' (And few enough of those: in the 77 productions of the 1958-59 season,
Actors Equity reported that the number of Broadway parts for black actors totaled 24.)
THE inspiration for ''A Raisin in the Sun,'' its author said, came after she had seen a play in 1956 that left
her ''disgusted with a whole body of material about Negroes.'' That night, she told her husband, Robert
Nemiroff, ''I'm going to write a social drama about Negroes that will be good art.'' But since devoting
herself full-time to playwriting in 1955, she had accomplished little -- drafts of three plays had gone
nowhere beyond sympathetic readings by her husband and friends. She expected much the same in the late
summer of 1957, when she and Nemiroff invited company for a dinner to their fourth-floor walk-up on
Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Then Nemiroff began to read from the work that had possessed his
wife for nearly a year. This time it was different. ''The feeling was one of excitement,'' Mr. Rose said,
during an interview in his office on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. After an animated discussion that
went on into the night, Mr. Rose called Hansberry early the next morning. ''I told her,'' he said, '' 'this play
has to get done, and it has to get done on Broadway.' ''
Mr. Rose would end up as a producer of nearly two dozen plays, including ''Purlie Victorious'' (1961), ''The
Owl and the Pussycat'' (1964) and the musical ''Shenandoah'' (1975). But at the time, he was 36 years old
and in the music business, producing and publishing. He said he had assumed that there would be
difficulties in getting a work by a first-time playwright on the boards, but not that raising the money would
take nearly 15 agonizing months. Networking among his friends brought a response ''somewhere between
admiration and pity,'' he said, along with donations of $50 toward what they regarded as a lost cause.
Established theatrical backers were equally skeptical. ''Much as some expressed admiration,'' Nemiroff
wrote in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of ''A Raisin in the Sun,'' the play ''was turned down
by virtually every established name in the business.''
The conventional wisdom was that ''nobody was going to pay those prices to see 'a bunch of Negroes
emoting,' '' Hansberry later said in a letter included in ''To Be Young, Gifted and Black,'' a collection of her
writings. (Nemiroff assembled the book after Hansberry's death from cancer at 34 in 1965, during the run
of her second Broadway play, ''The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window''; Nemiroff died in 1991.)
''Very often, the professionals were respectful, even admiring that I would think of trying to get the play
on,'' said Mr. Rose, who is writing a book about the production. ''However, they could not see where it
would make any money.'' He did have one ace: his friend Sidney Poitier. Already a movie star, the actor
had agreed to join the cast after being ''overwhelmed by the power of the material,'' as he wrote in his own
memoir, ''This Life.'' ''Without Sidney Poitier,'' Mr. Rose said, ''the play would never have seen the light of
day.'' Mr. Poitier was also responsible for the director. ''I had a pact with Sidney Poitier,'' Mr. Richards said
in an interview at his home on the Upper West Side. It dated to their time as students of the director and
drama teacher Paul Mann. ''One day, after class, Sidney said, 'If I ever do anything on Broadway, I want
you to direct it.' ''
In December 1957, Mr. Poitier introduced Mr. Richards, already known as an actor, teacher and director, to
Mr. Rose and Hansberry. They clicked. ''There was no question that I wanted to do the play,'' Mr. Richards
said, remembering that when he and his wife first read it, ''We laughed and cried; it was a wonderful
evening reading.'' Still, it was the work of a neophyte, and he and Hansberry struggled until opening night
to develop her script. Although not autobiographical, the story originated from an incident in Hansberry's
childhood.
Her parents, politically and socially prominent in Chicago's black upper-middle class, agreed in 1938 to
take the lead in the fight against housing segregation by buying a home in an all-white neighborhood near
the University of Chicago. Hansberry would always remember being an 8-year-old who was ''spat at,
cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.'' She also remembered the nights her mother
patroled their house with a loaded pistol against the ''literally howling mobs'' that surrounded their home
and once threw bricks through their windows.
But the real story of the play, Mr. Rose said, was not the family's move to the unreceptive white
neighborhood but Walter Lee Younger, the character portrayed by Mr. Poitier, ''and his development, his
being able to accept certain responsibilities.'' With this as the goal, playwright and director began their
work. Meanwhile, the tasks of production went on, including casting.
'' 'Raisin' was a big breakthrough,'' said Ruby Dee. ''The mainstream was not welcoming for AfricanAmerican actors.'' She signed on even though she would not have the ingenue role of Walter Lee's sister
that she desired; Diana Sands got the part, while Claudia McNeil portrayed his mother. Instead, Ms. Dee
would play his wife, Ruth: ''Another one of those put-upon wives. And they always seemed to be named
Ruth!'' But, she added: ''I dusted off my disappointment. This was very important. It was going to be a
Broadway show.''
It would be, that is, if the money could be raised. Throughout 1958, Mr. Rose sought big-money angels.
''The smart money on Broadway was not involved and would not be involved,'' Mr. Richards said. The
$75,000 budget (equivalent to more than $420,000 today) would eventually come from a group of 147
investors -- ''more than any play on Broadway had had up to that time,'' Mr. Richards said. Mr. Poitier's
wife, Juanita, invested $4,000 and ''about two or three people, including Harry Belafonte, put in $2,000
each,'' Mr. Rose said. But the most significant investor was the playwright William Gibson, whose ''Two
for the Seesaw'' had opened a successful run with Anne Bancroft and Henry Fonda in January 1958.
''I sent him the play,'' Mr. Rose recalled. ''He called me and said: 'This play must get on Broadway.' '' With
that endorsement (and Mr. Gibson's own stake of $750), his tax consultant, David J. Cogan, a previous
Broadway investor who initially had rejected ''A Raisin in the Sun,'' signed on as co-producer, and the
financing was complete. Rehearsals began on Dec. 27, 1958.
There was only one problem: no theater on Broadway would agree to rent to ''A Raisin in the Sun.'' The
same arguments were repeated: a white audience would not pay to see a nonmusical about blacks. The
possibility of black theatergoers was dismissed out of hand. And if they did come, would white patrons stay
away -- perhaps even boycott other shows? In 1958, the Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation
decision was four years old; not until February 1960 would the student sit-ins put the racial equality
movement permanently before the nation's conscience. Even in the relatively urbane climate of the Village,
an interracial couple like Hansberry and Nemiroff could expect stares and denial of service in some
restaurants.
MR. ROSE said he was advised to terminate the production until he could obtain a theater. Instead, he took
a gamble: he booked the traditional tryout theaters in New Haven and Philadelphia. ''And I prayed a lot,'' he
said. ''But I knew if we didn't do it, nothing was going to get done. The hope was that we had something so
spectacular, Broadway couldn't ignore us.'' His daring paid off. The rave reviews for the four-night
engagement in New Haven were matched during the two-week run in Philadelphia.
''A Raisin in the Sun'' ended up playing for 19 months at the Ethel Barrymore on Broadway. Hansberry won
the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, and most of the original cast starred in the 1961
film version, directed by Daniel Petrie. The 1973 musical ''Raisin'' was adapted from the play and produced
by Nemiroff. The play has been translated into 30 languages.
In retrospect, Mr. Rose can joke that during the prolonged incubation of ''A Raisin in the Sun'' he was
discouraged ''only about half the time.'' But his explanation for his stubborn determination is simple: ''I
believed in it. I loved the play.''