Review: A Raisin in the Sun by The City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun was a triumph for its 29-year-old author in 1959, winning the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It opened career avenues in theatre and in the cinema for a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett, Jr.
The play was a victory for African American arts, as well. Hansberry broke both the color barrier and the gender barrier in American theatre -- with a play based on her family's own experience with restrictive real estate covenants in Chicago, a struggle vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1940.
Lisa Jordan's production at Austin's City Theatre acknowledges that history but is not burdened by it. She and the cast find the strength of Hansberry's story where it resides: in the resilience of family.
The Younger family is the antithesis of the dark legend of African American existence, that unpleasant, dismissive stereotype of dysfunction, self-destructiveness and male absence.
Hansberry brought to life for middle class audiences a small, cohesive family very much like themselves. Three generations of Youngers share a crowded, pest-ridden apartment in Chicago. Recently widowed Lena, the mother (Michelle Alexander), awaits the arrival of a check for $10,000 as the life insurance settlement for the death of her husband, a devoted family man and tireless worker. Son Walter Lee (McArthur Moore) is a chauffeur, yearning to invest in a liquor store business. His wife Ruth (Kristen Bennett) does cleaning and laundry and his excitable idealistic sister Beneatha (Jessica Bacon) is in college, aiming for medical school. In this two-bedroom flat the Youngers' son Travis (Tré Whitney) sleeps on the living room sofa. There's always a morning queue to use the apartment house's shared bathroom, down the hall.
The pressures on this family are real and familiar ones, inherent to the American Dream. Walter Lee dislikes the demeaning aspect of his job and wants autonomy, financial security, and respect. Lena his mother wants all her family to escape their rundown neighborhood. Bubbling Beneatha is looking for a good man and a career as a healer. Ruth shares Mama's desire for suburban air, freedom and a garden but above all she wants her husband Walter Lee back from his moods, resentments and pie-in-the-sky schemes.
The $10,000 check lands in the midst of all those wants. It inflames hopes and pushes various family members into efforts to realize their goals. Obstacles, resistance, afflictions and fraud give the Youngers some mighty whacks. Racial discrimination plays a peripheral role. Walter Lee Younger becomes in some sense the prodigal son who never succeeded in leaving home, suffering his disasters right there in the living room for all to see.
A Raisin in the Sun is a comedy. First, in the classical sense that after disarray and disaster the family reunites in mutual trust and moves toward a cathartic change; second, in that Hansberry gives us, as leavening to that loaf of pain, the great satisfaction of comic dialogue and sharply observed comic secondary characters.
Beneatha's wide-eyed fascination with Nigerian student Asagai (Jerred Tettey) is close to fan worship; Asagai's African logic is earthy and cryptic, a pretty accurate representation of the cross-cultural miscomprehensions that persist today. Brandon Balque does Beneatha's other suitor, rich boy George Murchison, with prissy disdain, especially funny when Walter Lee rags him about his appearance.
McArthur Moore is an intense, physical actor -- not an athlete, but rather a sculptor of gesture, attention and presence. In this production he proves that his approach is as valid for drama as for comedy (I'm now remembering his performance as mad Uncle Gabe in Fences at City Theatre last year). Director Lisa Jordan knows how to use him, too. She sends Walter Lee up, bubbling with celebration and liquor, onto a tabletop, and later she reduces the deceived and humiliated Walter Lee into an inarticulate mass of misery in the middle of the floor.
Balancing Moore is Kristen Bennett as Ruth Younger, Walter Lee's wife. Bennett gives us a woman who is controlled, graceful, pained and immensely fatigued. Her silent facial reactions, like pictures, transmit as much as would a thousand words.
Michelle Alexander as the mother, Lena, portrays the bearing, authority and mildness of a matriarch. Her own young age struggles with that characterization, for make-up simply cannot provide the additional 30 years needed to match Mama's true age. Hers is a rich part, though, and she does it well, eliciting our suspension of disbelief.
A Raisin in the Sun is an unexpectedly lengthy piece, close to three hours when the fifteen-minute interval is included. That time passes quickly, for this production is rich in character, story and message. Thanks to City Theatre for the opportunity to experience it; and thanks to Lisa Jordan and her cast for delivering it with strength and tenderness.
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, March 17
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at Examiner.com, March 17
Review by webmaster, TheatreAustin, Yahoo groups, March 25
EXTRA
Click to view excerpts from program for A Raisin in the Sun at the City Theatre
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
City Theatre Company
