What they gleaned from one ‘Raisin’ -- a universal voice

If connecting with different kinds of people in very different ways makes a writer universal, then it’s a status achieved by Lorraine Hansberry. Her stories are being told again in what amounts to an unplanned mini-revival at theaters in Long Beach and Hollywood.

For a political firebrand like Amiri Baraka, the black radical poet and playwright (now perhaps best known for verses about the Sept. 11 attacks that have been decried as anti-Semitic), Hansberry’s landmark 1959 drama, “A Raisin in the Sun,” was all about racial struggle.

“For many of us, it was -- and remains -- the quintessential civil rights play ... [capturing] the essence of black will to defeat segregation, discrimination and oppression,” Baraka wrote in the Washington Post on the occasion of a 1986 revival.

But Shashin Desai knew almost nothing about civil rights and the struggles of black Americans when he sat in a Manhattan theater in 1960 watching “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was 21 and had recently arrived from India with the dream of making a life in the theater. What he saw on the stage that day never left him: the struggle of another young man trying to come into his own by making a radical departure from family tradition.

In Hansberry’s play, Walter Lee Younger bets his manhood and his future on a $10,000 investment in a liquor store, the clearest way he can see to become his own master and lift his family out of the cramped Chicago apartment where three generations of Youngers live uneasily. His mother, Lena, a long-suffering woman of vast moral authority, can’t abide the idea of profiting from vice.

Desai’s father, a wealthy Bombay businessman, could not fathom the intensity of his son’s dream, could not imagine playacting as any kind of life. Desai saw in Walter a manifestation of himself.

For Eileen Mack Knight, it was the pure eloquence and embracing humanity of Hansberry’s writing that hit home when she first read “A Raisin in the Sun” during the 1960s. “I loved the fact that I was listening to [another] African American woman’s voice, but there was more than that. It was what she was saying, how she was seeing human beings.”

“To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” which Knight is directing at the Fountain Theatre, touches on episodes from the writer’s early life, then carries chronologically through her adulthood. First produced in 1969, it includes scenes from “A Raisin in the Sun” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a 1964 drama about a white Greenwich Village intellectual that was the only other Hansberry work produced during her lifetime. It also includes glimpses of other plays and dramatized passages from Hansberry’s speeches and journals.

The spark for “Raisin” came from Hansberry’s childhood experience: When she was 8, her father, Carl, an affluent Chicago real estate investor, moved the family into an all-white neighborhood near the University of Chicago. At one point, a mob tried to drive the family away with bricks and epithets. Ultimately, according to Stephen A. Carter’s 1991 study, “Hansberry’s Drama,” the family was evicted because the neighborhood was governed by restrictive real estate covenants prohibiting black ownership. Hansberry’s father took his battle to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1940 ruled that such covenants were illegal.

Desai and his wife, caryn desai, who together run International City Theatre in Long Beach, are co-directing “Raisin,” the musical adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun” that features songs by Judd Woldin and Robert Brittan and that won a best-musical Tony Award in 1974. Though it enjoyed a successful initial run, it rarely has been performed since.

Hansberry’s husband, Robert Nemiroff, adapted “Raisin” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” from her original writings after she died in 1965 of stomach cancer at age 34.

“Raisin” was never an easy sell, says Donald McKayle, the original production’s director and choreographer. It took four years to find a producer, he recalls -- and even then it was the nonprofit Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., rather than a Broadway backer, that took the chance. “It just wasn’t [commercial producers’] idea of a musical. Why would anyone want to come see a musical about a poor, black family in a ghetto?”

McKayle remembers Nemiroff, his friend since they were both politically active New York City teenagers, as an impassioned defender and promoter of his wife’s legacy. “He was always absolutely bedazzled by her work, and he spent the rest of his life making sure that Lorraine’s life and work were constantly in the forefront.”

But by the time of Nemiroff’s death in 1991, Hansberry’s works other than “A Raisin in the Sun” were largely forgotten.

Desai didn’t even know there was a musical version of the play until three years ago. Always on the lookout for musicals that can feed the box office while furthering his company’s mission of nourishing audiences with serious theater, Desai was tipped by a friend that “Raisin” might fit the bill. When the show was announced, Nell Carter, a star onstage (“Ain’t Misbehavin’ ”) and on television (“Gimme a Break!”), jumped at the chance to play Lena Younger, in whom she saw the staunch, dignified grandmother who raised her.

Carter recalled that when she was a girl her grandmother took her to see “A Raisin in the Sun” in New York. “She wanted me to see that the black person could do something. I saw it and I was mesmerized by it.” The star hoped to lead the Long Beach revival on to Broadway, but her sudden death on Jan. 23, at 54, threw the show into crisis. Within a day, Desai found Broadway veteran Carol Dennis to take over the part so the production could go on as scheduled.

“I call it climbing the mountain,” Desai says. “There is a determination and a purpose” to defeat adversity and honor Carter’s memory with a strong, successful show.

Knight discovered “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” through its 1972 television production starring Ruby Dee, Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider. It never left her mind, and two summers ago she oversaw a staged reading of the piece for the Actors Conservatory Ensemble, a group she has helped lead since 1998. Hardly anybody came, but Knight and the cast loved the play so much they did it again last summer. This time the company’s venue, the S. Mark Taper Foundation Amphitheatre in Beverly Hills, was packed. Among those attending was Stephen Sachs, the Fountain Theatre’s co-artistic director.

Sachs went in with the usual equation in mind: Lorraine Hansberry equals “A Raisin in the Sun.”

Instead, he recalls, the reading unfurled “a tapestry of her literary mind. I walked away that night saying, ‘I had no idea. I feel I’ve been turned on to a new writer -- a writer I thought I knew but didn’t know as well as I should have.’ ”

“To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” now a full production, features seven actors, each of whom impersonates Hansberry at some point, and eight singers whose songs set up and comment on the action.

People might assume from the title that Hansberry’s focus was her own race, Knight says, but the writing proves otherwise. “I think it will never be old, will never be stale, will never be dated because she speaks to the universality of all of us.”

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A Hansberry sampler

The playwright’s words underscore why she became a voice on race, and not just among blacks.

Lorraine Hansberry began her writing career in 1950 as a reporter and editor for Freedom magazine, a political and cultural monthly published by Paul Robeson. She met her husband, Robert Nemiroff, on an anti-discrimination picket line in 1953; three years later, “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” a song Nemiroff co-wrote, reached No. 9 on the Billboard pop singles chart, enabling Hansberry to devote herself to writing full time. In 1959, “A Raisin in the Sun” established her as the first woman, first black person and youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. Here are samples of her writing:

“I think that virtually every human being is dramatically interesting. Not only is he dramatically interesting, he is a creature of stature whoever he is.”

From “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

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“I have come to maturity, as we all must, knowing that greed and malice, indifference to human misery and, perhaps above all else, ignorance -- the prime ancient and persistent enemy of man -- abound in this world.”

From “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

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Beneatha: “That individual in that room is no brother of mine.... Love him? There is nothing left to love.”

Mama: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that yet, you ain’t learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ‘cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”

-- From Act III of

“A Raisin in the Sun”

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“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love.... Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.... I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars....”

From “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”

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Mavis (on learning that a black man wants to marry her wayward sister, Gloria): “The last time I looked around me there were still some white men left in this world. Some fine ordinary upstanding plain decent very white men who were still looking to marry very white women.”

Sidney: “Well, Iris, there she is: Mavis! The Bulwark of the Republic! The Mother Middleclass itself, standing there revealed in all its towering courage. Mavis, go home.”

Mavis (near tears, but with dignity): “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia. I was taught to believe that creativity and great intelligence ought to make one expansive and understanding. That if ordinary people, among whom I have the sense at least to count myself, could not expect understanding from artists and -- whatever it is you are, Sidney -- then where indeed might we look for it at all in this quite dreadful world? Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

-- From “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (and used in “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”)

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‘Raisin’

Where: Long Beach Performing Arts Center, Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach

When: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: March 9

Price: $32-$40

Contact: (562) 436-4610

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‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’

Where: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood

When: Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 23

Price: $25

Contact: (323) 663-1525