A Raisin in the Sun Read online

  What is for me personally, as a witness to and sometime participant in the foregoing events, most gratifying about the current revival is that today, some twenty-nine years after Lorraine Hansberry, thinking back with disbelief a few nights after the opening of Raisin, typed out these words—

  … I had turned the last page out of the typewriter and pressed all the sheets neatly together in a pile, and gone and stretched out face down on the living room floor. I had finished a play; a play I had no reason to think or not think would ever be done; a play that I was sure no one would quite understand.… 7

  —her play is not only being done, but that more than she had ever thought possible—and more clearly than it ever has been before—it is being “understood.”

  Yet one last point that I must make because it has come up so many times of late. I have been asked if I am not surprised that the play still remains so contemporary, and isn’t that a “sad” commentary on America? It is indeed a sad commentary, but the question also assumed something more: that it is the topicality of the play’s immediate events—i.e., the persistence of white opposition to unrestricted housing and the ugly manifestations of racism in its myriad forms—that keeps it alive. But I don’t believe that such alone is what explains its vitality at all. For though the specifics of social mores and societal patterns will always change, the decline of the “New England territory” and the institution of the traveling salesman does not, for example, “date” Death of a Salesman, any more than the fact that we now recognize love (as opposed to interfamilial politics) as a legitimate basis for marriage obviates Romeo and Juliet. If we ever reach a time when the racial madness that afflicts America is at last truly behind us—as obviously we must if we are to survive in a world composed four-fifths of peoples of color—then I believe A Raisin in the Sun will remain no less pertinent. For at the deepest level it is not a specific situation but the human condition, human aspiration, and human relationships—the persistence of dreams, of the bonds and conflicts between men and women, parents and children, old ways and new, and the endless struggle against human oppression, whatever the forms it may take, and for individual fulfillment, recognition, and liberation—that are at the heart of such plays. It is not surprising therefore that in each generation we recognize ourselves in them anew.

  Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

  October 1988

  *The late ROBERT NEMIROFF, Lorraine Hansberry’s literary executor, shared a working relationship with the playwright from the time of their marriage in 1953. He was the producer and/or adapter of several of her works, including The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window; To Be Young, Gifted and Black; and Les Blancs. In 1974, his production of the musical Raisin, based on A Raisin in the Sun, won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

  1“Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Village Voice, August 12, 1959.

  2“The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry,” Freedomways, Summer 1985.

  3A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Vintage Books, 1995.

  4Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, New American Library, p. 51.

  5“Make New Sounds: Studs Terkel Interviews Lorraine Hansberry,” American Theatre, November 1984.

  6Much fuller directions for staging purposes are contained in the Samuel French Thirtieth Anniversary acting edition.

  7To Be Young, Gifted and Black, p. 120.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In addition to individuals and institutions recalled above and in the American Playhouse and Broadway credits—and the many others too numerous to record who have contributed to the current revival—I wish especially to thank:

  Gene Feist and Todd Haimes of the Roundabout Theatre, without whom what followed could never have been;

  Burt D’Lugoff, Howard Hausman, Alan Bomser, and Seymour Baldash, whose support and critical judgment have been invaluable;

  Jaki Brown, Toni Livingston, and Josephine Abady, who first dared to dream and then to break the first ground to bring Raisin to television;

  Esther Rolle and all in the Roundabout Raisin “family” whose unwavering commitment through three on-again, off-again, touch-and-go years were the rock on which the production stood;

  Danny Glover, whose name, alongside Ms. Rolle’s, made the production possible but did not prepare one for the magnificent actuality of his work;

  David M. Davis and Lindsay Law of American Playhouse; Ricki Franklin, Phylis Geller, and Samuel J. Paul of KCET/Los Angeles; and David Loxton and WNET/New York—who extended every cooperation and maximum freedom for us to develop and produce the television production as we saw it; and

  Producer Chiz Schultz and co-producer Steve Schwartz, who brought to the new incarnation not only impeccable judgment and assured expertise, but an integrity of caring dedication to the playwright’s vision and text that one meets rarely, if ever, at the crossroads of art and commerce.

  I regret that there is not the space to name here, too, each of the wonderful actors, understudies, designers, technicians, and staff of both the Roundabout and television productions who do not appear in the Playhouse credits, but whose contributions and spirits are joined to those of their colleagues on screen. I am indebted to them all.

  And, finally, two in a place by themselves:

  My wife, Jewell Handy Gresham, who has stood unbending through the worst and the best of times, providing light and unfailing inspiration to the vision we share; and

  Samuel Liff of the William Morris Agency, without whose personal commitment and extraordinary perseverance going far beyond the professional to a true love of theater and art, much that has happened could never have been.

  R.N.

  1988

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  Act I

  Scene One: Friday morning.

  Scene Two: The following morning.

  Act II

  Scene One: Later, the same day.

  Scene Two: Friday night, a few weeks later.

  Scene Three: Moving day, one week later.

  Act III

  An hour later.

  About the Author

  The American Playhouse television presentation of A RAISIN IN THE SUN, broadcast on February 1, 1989, was a production of Robert Nemiroff/Jaki Brown/Toni Livingston/Josephine Abady Productions, Fireside Entertainment Corporation, and KCET/Los Angeles in association with WNET/New York.

  CAST

  (in order of appearance)

  RUTH YOUNGER Starletta DuPois

  WALTER LEE YOUNGER Danny Glover

  TRAVIS YOUNGER Kimble Joyner

  BENEATHA YOUNGER Kim Yancey

  LENA YOUNGER Esther Rolle

  JOSEPH ASAGAI Lou Ferguson

  GEORGE MURCHISON Joseph C. Phillips

  MRS. JOHNSON Helen Martin

  KARL LINDNER John Fiedler

  BOBO Stephen Henderson

  MOVING MEN Ron O.J. Parson,

  Charles Watts

  Directed by Bill Duke

  Produced by Chiz Schultz

  Executive Producer Robert Nemiroff

  Co-Producer Production Design

  Steven S. Schwartz Thomas Cariello

  Lighting Design Costume Design

  Bill Klages Celia Bryant and Judy Dearing

  Music Edited by

  Ed Bland Gary Anderson

  Camerawork

  Greg Cook, Gregory Harms, Kenneth A. Patterson

  (Based on the 25th Anniversary Stage Production

  Directed by Harold Scott

  Produced by The Roundabout Theatre Company, Inc.

  [Gene Feist/Todd Haimes] and Robert Nemiroff)

  Produced for American Playhouse with funds from Public Television Stations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. American Playhouse is presented by KCET, SCETV, WGBH, and WNET; Executive Director David M. Davis, Executive Producer Lindsay Law, Director of Program Development Lynn Holst. For KCET: Executive Producer Ricki Franklin, Supervising Producer Samuel J. Paul, Executive in Charge Phylis Geller; with additional funds from the Ambassador International Foundation. For WNET: Executive Producer David Loxton.

  A RAISIN IN THE SUN was first presented by Philip Rose and David J. Cogan at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City, March 11, 1959, with the following cast:

  (In order of appearance)

  RUTH YOUNGER Ruby Dee

  TRAVIS YOUNGER Glynn Turman

  WALTER LEE YOUNGER (BROTHER) Sidney Poitier

  BENEATHA YOUNGER Diana Sands

  LENA YOUNGER (MAMA) Claudia McNeil

  JOSEPH ASAGAI Ivan Dixon

  GEORGE MURCHISON Louis Gossett

  KARL LINDNER John Fiedler

  BOBO Lonne Elder III

  MOVING MEN Ed Hall,

  Douglas Turner Ward

  Directed by Lloyd Richards

  Designed and Lighted by Ralph Alswang

  Costumes by Virginia Volland

  The action of the play is set

  in Chicago’s Southside, sometime between

  World War II and the present.

  Act I

  Scene One: Friday morning.

  Scene Two: The following morning.

  Act II

  Scene One: Later, the same day.

  Scene Two: Friday night, a few weeks later.

  Scene Three: Moving day, one week later.

  Act III

  An hour later.

  ACT I

  SCENE ONE

  The YOUNGER living room would be a comfortable and well-ordered room if it were not for a number of indestructible contradictions to this state of being. Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and their primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years—and they are tired. Still, we can see that at some time, a time probably no longer remembered by the family (except perhaps for MAMA), the furnishings of this room were actually selected with care and love and even hope—and brought to this apartment and arranged with taste and pride.

  That was a long time ago. Now the once loved pattern of the couch upholstery has to fight to show itself from under acres of crocheted doilies and couch covers which have themselves finally come to be more important than the upholstery. And here a table or a chair has been moved to disguise the worn places in the carpet; but the carpet has fought back by showing its weariness, with depressing uniformity, elsewhere on its surface.

  Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished, washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room.

  Moreover, a section of this room, for it is not really a room unto itself, though the landlord’s lease would make it seem so, slopes backward to provide a small kitchen area, where the family prepares the meals that are eaten in the living room proper, which must also serve as dining room. The single window that has been provided for these “two” rooms is located in this kitchen area. The sole natural light the family may enjoy in the course of a day is only that which fights its way through this little window.

  At left, a door leads to a bedroom which is shared by MAMA and her daughter, BENEATHA. At right, opposite, is a second room (which in the beginning of the life of this apartment was probably a breakfast room) which serves as a bedroom for WALTER and his wife, RUTH.

  Time: Sometime between World War II and the present.

  Place: Chicago’s Southside.

  At Rise: It is morning dark in the living room, TRAVIS is asleep on the make-down bed at center. An alarm clock sounds from within the bedroom at right, and presently RUTH enters from that room and closes the door behind her. She crosses sleepily toward the window. As she passes her sleeping son she reaches down and shakes him a little. At the window she raises the shade and a dusky Southside morning light comes in feebly. She fills a pot with water and puts it on to boil. She calls to the boy, between yawns, in a slightly muffled voice.

  RUTH is about thirty. We can see that she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face. In a few years, before thirty-five even, she will be known among her people as a “settled woman.”

  She crosses to her son and gives him a good, final, rousing shake.

  RUTH Come on now, boy, it’s seven thirty! (Her son sits up at last, in a stupor of sleepiness) I say hurry up, Travis! You ain’t the only person in the world got to use a bathroom! (The child, a sturdy, handsome little boy of ten or eleven, drags himself out of the bed and almost blindly takes his towels and “today’s clothes” from drawers and a closet and goes out to the bathroom, which is in an outside hall and which is shared by another family or families on the same floor, RUTH crosses to the bedroom door at right and opens it and calls in to her husband) Walter Lee! … It’s after seven thirty! Lemme see you do some waking up in there now! (She waits) You better get up from there, man! It’s after seven thirty I tell you. (She waits again) All right, you just go ahead and lay there and next thing you know Travis be finished and Mr. Johnson’ll be in there and you’ll be fussing and cussing round here like a madman! And be late too! (She waits, at the end of patience) Walter Lee—it’s time for you to GET UP!

  (She waits another second and then starts to go into the bedroom, but is apparently satisfied that her husband has begun to get up. She stops, pulls the door to, and returns to the kitchen area. She wipes her face with a moist cloth and runs her fingers through her sleep-disheveled hair in a vain effort and ties an apron around her housecoat. The bedroom door at right opens and her husband stands in the doorway in his pajamas, which are rumpled and mismated. He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties, inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits—and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment)

  WALTER Is he out yet?

  RUTH What you mean out? He ain’t hardly got in there good yet.

  WALTER (Wandering in, still more oriented to sleep than to a new day) Well, what was you doing all that yelling for if I can’t even get in there yet? (Stopping and thinking) Check coming today?

  RUTH They said Saturday and this is just Friday and I hopes to God you ain’t going to get up here first thing this morning and start talking to me ’bout no money—’cause I ’bout don’t want to hear it.

  WALTER Something the matter with you this morning?

  RUTH No—I’m just sleepy as the devil. What kind of eggs you want?

  WALTER Not scrambled, (RUTH starts to scramble eggs) Paper come? (RUTH points impatiently to the rolled up Tribune on the table, and he gets it and spreads it out and vaguely reads the front page) Set off another bomb yesterday.

  RUTH (Maximum indifference) Did they?

  WALTER (Looking up) What’s the matter with you?

  RUTH Ain’t nothing the matter with me. And don’t keep asking me that this morning.

  WALTER Ain’t nobody bothering you. (Reading the news of the day absently again) Say Colonel McCormick is sick.

  RUTH (Affecting tea-party interest) Is he now? Poor thing.

  WALTER (Sighing and looking at his watch) Oh, me. (He waits) Now what is that boy doing in that bathroom all this time? He just going to have to start getting up earlier. I can’t be being late to work on account of him fooling around in there.

  RUTH (Turning on him) Oh, no he ain’t going to be getting up no earlier no such thing! It ain’t his fault that he can’t get to bed no earlier nights ’cause he got a bunch of crazy good-for-nothing clowns sitting up running their mouths in what is supposed to be his bedroom after ten o’clock at night …

  WALTER That’s what you mad about, ain’t it? The things I want t
o talk about with my friends just couldn’t be important in your mind, could they?

  (He rises and finds a cigarette in her handbag on the table and crosses to the little window and looks out, smoking and deeply enjoying this first one)

  RUTH (Almost matter of factly, a complaint too automatic to deserve emphasis) Why you always got to smoke before you eat in the morning?

  WALTER (At the window) Just look at ’em down there … Running and racing to work … (He turns and faces his wife and watches her a moment at the stove, and then, suddenly) You look young this morning, baby.

  RUTH (Indifferently) Yeah?

  WALTER Just for a second—stirring them eggs. Just for a second it was—you looked real young again. (He reaches for her; she crosses away. Then, drily) It’s gone now—you look like yourself again!

  RUTH Man, if you don’t shut up and leave me alone.

  WALTER (Looking out to the street again) First thing a man ought to learn in life is not to make love to no colored woman first thing in the morning. You all some eeeevil people at eight o’clock in the morning.

  (TRAVIS appears in the hall doorway, almost fully dressed and quite wide awake now, his towels and pajamas across his shoulders. He opens the door and signals for his father to make the bathroom in a hurry)

  TRAVIS (Watching the bathroom) Daddy, come on!

  (WALTER gets his bathroom utensils and flies out to the bathroom)

  RUTH Sit down and have your breakfast, Travis.

  TRAVIS Mama, this is Friday. (Gleefully) Check coming tomorrow, huh?