A Raisin in the Sun Structuralism Project
For this project, complete the following steps. Note my examples of each step at the bottom of the page:
1: IDENTIFY a textual moment (I define this as a chunk of dialogue of any length spoken by one character)
2: Pluck out any three words from that dialogue
3: Define each as you THINK the character defines them (you THEORIZE)
4: Fill in the blank with a word or concept of YOUR choice, that you would be willing you defend: This characters philosophy of _______ FRAMES his or her perception of the textual moment
5: Determine what the anchor is that HOLDS the fixed structure togetherthe thing without which nothing holds; describe and defend in three-to-five sentences (you THEORIZE, basically, what a force is that binds HOW words can mean within your characters philosophy. For instance, within a Christian philosophy, we might define Jesus as Son of God, Mary as Mother of Jesus, Bible as Word of God, and marriage as union of man-woman. However, the symbol of G-O-D is such that, without it, the words we just mention can NO LONGER be defined as the simplistic, joined-at-the-help definitions we created. Funnily enough, though, if we try to DEFINE G-O-D in this Christian scheme, wed have little success, because being of Christian philosophy requires our subservience to G-O-D, at least in theory; the second that G-O-D is allowed to be defined and made possible through language, the word loses its allure, the scheme loses its majesty, and the whole fixed structure topples. Words like Jesus/Bible/Mary/marriage had their unitary definitions made possible by G-O-D, but if the latter is just another word, anything is able to mean anything else–everything becomes discourse, chaos. So structuralism relies on the existence of such a force as G-O-D; lets call it, the G-O-D factor)
My example of each step (follow along in book):
1: (Act 1, Scene 1).
2: Three words Ill pluck out from Walter: tired/man/woman.
3: To Walter, in that moment,
tired financially frustrated
man economic provider of household
woman emotionally subordinated to husband.
4: Walters philosophy of marriage FRAMES his perception of this textual moment.
5: THE GOD FACTOR: MONEY, in which I would advance a theory that MONEY is the thing without which tired would NO LONGER mean how I defined it in step 3, within Walters philosophy of marriage. I would defend this point in up to three sentences.
^I would repeat this process for the other two words, with up to THREE sentences per word. Simply provide me three paragraphs of text–one per word–with up to three sentences per paragraph. In-text citations are encouraged but not required.
DIRECTIONS and EVALUATION~
In addition to the blue text above, the only way I want you to format this is simply to CREATE numbers 1-5 in a blog entry, and add in all text in a range and format similar to my example, above. written reports should be completed in 600-700 words
Works by
LORRAINE HANSBERRY
A Raisin in the Sun
The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window
The Drinking Gourd
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Les Blancs
What Use Are Flowers?
The Movement
FIRST VINTAGE BOOK EDITION, DECEMBER 1994
Copyright 1958, 1986 by Robert Nemiroff, as an unpublished work
Copyright 1959, 1966, 1984, 1987, 1988 by Robert Nemiroff
Introduction copyright 1987, 1988 by Robert Nemiroff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in hardcover in somewhat different form by Random House,
Inc., New York, in 1958.
Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that A Raisin
in the Sun, being fully protected under the copyright Laws of the
United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion
of Canada, and all other countries of the Universal Copyright and Berne
Conventions, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional,
amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and
television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign
languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the
question of readings, permission for which must be secured in writing.
All inquiries should be addressed to the William Morris Agency, 1350
Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, authorized agents for
the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry and for Robert Nemiroff, Executor.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for
permission to reprint eleven lines from Dream Deferred (Harlem)
from The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes. Copyright
1951 by Langston Hughes.
Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hansberry, Lorraine, 19301965.
A raisin in the sun / by Lorraine Hansberry; with an introduction
by Robert Nemiroff.1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80744-1
1. Afro-AmericansHistory20th centuryDrama. I. Title.
PS3515.A515R3 1994
812.54dc20 94-20636
v3.1
To Mama:
in gratitude for the dream
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat
Or crust and sugar over
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
LANGSTON HUGHES
INTRODUCTION
by Robert Nemiroff*
This is the most complete edition of A Raisin in the Sun
ever published. Like the American Playhouse production
for television, it restores to the play two scenes unknown to
the general public, and a number of other key scenes and
passages staged for the first time in twenty-fifth anniversary
revivals and, most notably, the Roundabout Theatres
Kennedy Center production on which the television picture
is based.
The events of every passing year add resonance to A
Raisin in the Sun. It is as if history is conspiring to make
the play a classic; one of a handful of great American
dramas A Raisin in the Sun belongs in the inner circle,
along with Death of a Salesman, Long Days Journey into
Night, and The Glass Menagerie. So wrote The New York
Times and the Washington Post respectively of Harold
Scotts revelatory stagings for the Roundabout in which
most of these elements, cut on Broadway, were restored.
The unprecedented resurgence of the work (a dozen
regional revivals at this writing, new publications and
productions abroad, and now the television production that
will be seen by millions) prompts the new edition.
Produced in 1959, the play presaged the revolution in
black and womens consciousnessand the revolutionary
ferment in Africathat exploded in the years following the
playwrights death in 1965 to ineradicably alter the social
fabric and consciousness of the nation and the world. As so
many have commented lately, it did so in a manner and to
an extent that few could have foreseen, for not only the
restored material, but much else that passed unnoticed in
the play at the time, speaks to issues that are now
inescapable: value systems of the black family; concepts of
African American beauty and identity; class and
generational conflicts; the relationships of husbands and
wives, black men and women; the outspoken (if then yet
unnamed) feminism of the daughter; and, in the penultimate
scene between Beneatha and Asagai, the larger statement
of the playand the ongoing struggle it portends.
Not one of the cuts, it should be emphasized, was made
to dilute or censor the play or to soften its statement, for
everyone in that herculean, now-legendary band that
brought Raisin to Broadwayand most specifically the
producer, Philip Rose, and director, Lloyd Richards
believed in the importance of that statement with a
degree of commitment that would have countenanced
nothing of the kind. How and why, then, did the cuts come
about?
The scene in which Beneatha unveils her natural haircut
is an interesting example. In 1959, when the play was
presented, the rich variety of Afro styles introduced in the
mid-sixties had not yet arrived: the very few black women
who wore their hair unstraightened cut it very short. When
the hair of Diana Sands (who created the role) was
cropped in this fashion, however, a few days before the
opening, it was not contoured to suit her: her particular
facial structure required a fuller Afro, of the sort she in fact
adopted in later years. Result? Rather than vitiate the
playwrights pointthe beauty of black hairthe scene
was dropped.
Some cuts were similarly the result of happenstance or
unpredictables of the kind that occur in any production:
difficulties with a scene, the processes of actors, the
dynamics of staging, etc. But most were related to the
length of the play: running time. Time in the context of
bringing to Broadway the first play by a black (young and
unknown) woman, to be directed, moreover, by another
unknown black first, in a theater were black audiences
virtually did not existand where, in the entire history of the
American stage, there had never been a serious
commercially successful black drama!
So unlikely did the prospects seem in that day, in fact, to
all but Phil Rose and the company, that much as some
expressed admiration for the play, Roses eighteen-month
effort to find a co-producer to help complete the financing
was turned down by virtually every established name in the
business. He was joined at the last by another newcomer,
David Cogan, but even with the money in hand, not a single
theater owner on the Great White Way would rent to the
new production! So that when the play left New York for
tryoutswith a six-hundred-dollar advance in New Haven
and no theater to come back tohad the script and
performance been any less ready, and the response of
critics and audiences any less unreserved than they proved
to be, A Raisin in the Sun would never have reached
Broadway.
Under these circumstances the pressures were
enormous (if unspoken and rarely even acknowledged in
the excitement of the work) not to press fate unduly with
unnecessary risks. And the most obvious of these was the
running time. It is one thing to present a four-and-a-half-hour
drama by Eugene ONeill on Broadwaybut a first play
(even ignoring the special features of this one) in the
neighborhood of even three??? By common consensus,
the need to keep the show as tight and streamlined as
possible was manifest. Some thingsphilosophical flights,
nuances the general audience might not understand,
shadings, embellishmentswould have to be sacrificed.
At the time the cuts were made (there were also some
very good ones that focused and strengthened the drama),
it was assumed by all that they would in no way significantly
affect or alter the statement of the play, for there is nothing
in the omitted lines that is not implicit elsewhere in, and
throughout, A Raisin in the Sun. But to think this was to
reckon without two factors the future would bring into play.
The first was the swiftness and depth of the revolution in
consciousness that was coming and the consequent,
perhaps inevitable, tendency of some people to assume,
because the world had changed, that any successful
work which preceded the change must embody the values
they had outgrown. And the second was the nature of the
American audience.
James Baldwin has written that Americans suffer from
an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred. He is
referring to that apparently endless capacity we have
nurtured through long years to deceive ourselves where
race is concerned: the baggage of myth and preconception
we carry with us that enables northerners, for example, to
shield themselves from the extent and virulence of
segregation in the North, so that each time an incident of
violence so egregious that they cannot look past it occurs
they are shocked anew, as if it had never happened
before or as if the problem were largely pass. (In 1975,
when the cast of Raisin, the musical, became involved in
defense of a family whose home in Queens, New York City,
had been fire-bombed, we learned of a 1972 City
Commissioner of Human Rights Report, citing eleven
cases in the last eighteen months in which minority-owned
homes had been set afire or vandalized, a church had been
bombed, and a school bus had been attackedin New
York City!)
But Baldwin is referring also to the human capacity,
where a work of art is involved, to substitute, for what the
writer has written, what in our hearts we wish to believe. As
Hansberry put it in response to one reviewers enthusiastic
if particularly misguided praise of her play: it did not
disturb the writer in the least that there is no such
implication in the entire three acts. He did not need it in the
play; he had it in his head.1
Such problems did not, needless to say, stop America
from embracing A Raisin in the Sun. But it did interfere
drastically, for a generation, with the way the play was
interpreted and assessedand, in hindsight, it made all
the more regrettable the abridgment (though without it
would we even know the play today?). In a remarkable
rumination on Hansberrys death, Ossie Davis (who
succeeded Sidney Poitier in the role of Walter Lee) put it
this way:
The play deserved all thisthe playwright deserved all
this, and more. Beyond question! But I have a feeling
that for all she got, Lorraine Hansberry never got all
she deserved in regard to A Raisin in the Sunthat
she got success, but that in her success she was
cheated, both as a writer and as a Negro.
One of the biggest selling points about Raisin
filling the grapevine, riding the word-of-mouth, laying
the foundation for its wide, wide acceptancewas
how much the Younger family was just like any other
American family. Some people were ecstatic to find
that it didnt really have to be about Negroes at all! It
was, rather, a walking, talking, living demonstration of
our mythic conviction that, underneath, all of us
A me ri c a ns , color-aint-got-nothing-to-do-with-it, are
pretty much alike. People are just people, whoever
they are; and all they want is a chance to be like other
people. This uncritical assumption, sentimentally held
by the audience, powerfully fixed in the character of the
powerful mother with whom everybody could identify,
immediately and completely, made any other
questions about the Youngers, and what living in the
slums of Southside Chicago had done to them, not
only irrelevant and impertinent, but also
disloyal because everybody who walked into the
theater saw in Lena Younger his own great
American Mama. And that was decisive.2
In effect, as Davis went on to develop, white America
kidnapped Mama, stole her away and used her fantasized
image to avoid what was uniquely African American in the
play. And what it was saying.
Thus, in many reviews (and later academic studies), the
Younger familymaintained by two female domestics and
a chauffeur, son of a laborer dead of a lifetime of hard labor
was transformed into an acceptably middle class
family. The decision to move became a desire to
integrate (rather than, as Mama says simply, to find the
nicest house for the least amount of money for my family.
Them houses they put up for colored in them areas way out
always seem to cost twice as much.).
In his A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Suns
Enduring Passion, Amiri Baraka comments aptly: We
missed the essence of the workthat Hansberry had
created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and
ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and
among the people. The Younger family is part of the
black majority, and the concerns I once dismissed as
middle classbuying a home and moving into white
folks neighborhoodsare actually reflective of the
essence of black peoples striving and the will to defeat
segregation, discrimination, and national oppression.
There is no such thing as a white folks neighborhood
except to racists and to those submitting to racism.3
Mama herselfabout whose acceptance of her place
in the society there is not a word in the play, and who, in
quest of her familys survival over the soul- and body-
crushing conditions of the ghetto, is prepared to defy
housing-pattern taboos, threats, bombs, and God knows
what elsebecame the safely conservative matriarch,
upholder of the social order and proof that if one only
perseveres with faith, everything will come out right in the
end and the-system-aint-so-bad-after-all. (All this,
presumably, because, true to character, she speaks and
thinks in the language of her generation, shares their
dream of a better life and, like millions of her counterparts,
takes her Christianity to heart.) At the same time,
necessarily, Big Walter Youngerthe husband who reared
this family with her and whose unseen presence and
influence can be heard in every scenevanished from
analysis.
And perhaps most ironical of all to the playwright, who
had herself as a child been almost killed in such a real-life
story,4 the climax of the play became, pure and simple, a
happy endingdespite the fact that it leaves the
Youngers on the brink of what will surely be, in their new
home, at best a nightmare of uncertainty. (If he thinks thats
a happy ending, said Hansberry in an interview, I invite
him to come live in one of the communities where the
Youngers are going!5) Which is not even to mention the
fact that that little house in a blue-collar neighborhood
hardly suburbia, as some have imaginedis hardly the
answer to the deeper needs and inequities of race and
class and sex that Walter and Beneatha have articulated.
When Lorraine Hansberry read the reviewsdelighted
by the accolades, grateful for the recognition, but also
deeply troubledshe decided in short order to put back
many of the materials excised. She did that in the 1959
Random House edition, but faced with the actuality of a
prize-winning play, she hesitated about some others which,
for reasons now beside the point, had not in rehearsal
come alive. She later felt, however, that the full last scene
between Beneatha and Asagai (drastically cut on
Broadway) and Walters bedtime scene with Travis
(eliminated entirely) should be restored at the first
opportunity, and this was done in the 1966 New American
Library edition. As anyone who has seen the recent
productions will attest, they are among the most moving
(and most applauded) moments in the play.
Because the visit of Mrs. Johnson adds the costs of
another character to the cast and ten more minutes to the
play, it has not been used in most revivals. But where it has
been tried it has worked to solidoften hilariouseffect. It
can be seen in the American Playhouse production, and is
included here in any case, because it speaks to
fundamental issues of the play, makes plain the reality that
waits the Youngers at the curtain, and, above all, makes
clear what, in the eyes of the author, Lena Youngerin her
typicality within the black experiencedoes and does not
represent.
Another scenethe Act I, Scene Two moment in which
Beneatha observes and Travis gleefully recounts his latest
adventure in the street belowmakes tangible and visceral
one of the many facts of ghetto life that impel the Youngers
move. As captured on television and published here for the
first time, it is its own sobering comment on just how
middle class a family this is.
A word about the stage and interpretive directions.
These are the authors original directions combined, where
meaningful to the reader,6 with the staging insights of two
great directors and companies: Lloyd Richards classic
staging of that now-legendary cast that first created the
roles; and Harold Scotts, whose searching explorations of
the text in successive revivals over many years
culminating in the inspired production that broke box office
records at the Kennedy Center and won ten awards for
Scott and the companyhave given the fuller text, in my
view, its most definitive realization to date.
Finally, a note about the American Playhouse production.
Unlike the drastically cut and largely one-dimensional 1961
movie versionwhich, affecting and pioneering though it
may have been, reflected little of the greatness of the
original stage performancesthis new screen version is a
luminous embodiment of the stage play as reconceived, but
not altered, for the camera, and is exquisitely performed.
That it is, is due inextricably to producer Chiz Schultzs and
director Bill Dukes unswerving commitment to the text;
Harold Scotts formative work with the stage company;
Dukes own fresh insights and the cinematic brilliance of
his reconception and direction for the screen; and the
energizing infusion into this mix of Danny Glovers classic
performance as Walter Lee to Esther Rolles superlative
Mama. As in the case of any production, I am apt to
question a nuance here and there, and regrettably,
because of a happenstance in production, the Walter-
Travis scene has been omitted. But that scene will, I expect,
be restored in the videocassette version of the picture,
which should be available shortly. It is thus an excellent
version for study.
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 possibleand more clearly than it ever
has been beforeit 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
isnt 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 plays
immediate eventsi.e., the persistence of white opposition
to unrestricted housing and the ugly manifestations of
racism in its myriad formsthat keeps it alive. But I dont
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 usas obviously we must if we are to survive in a
world composed four-fifths of peoples of colorthen 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
relationshipsthe 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 liberationthat 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 Hansberrys 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 Brusteins 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.
1Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live, Village
Voice, August 12, 1959.
2The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry, Freedomways, Summer
1985.
3A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window,
Vintage Books, 1995.
4Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black , New American Library,
p. 51.
5Make 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 creditsand the
many others too numerous to record who have contributed
to the current revivalI wish especially to thank:
Gene Feist and Todd Haimes of the Roundabout
Theatre, without whom what followed could never
have been;
Burt DLugoff, 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. Rolles,
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 Yorkwho 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 playwrights 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
Bill Klages
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
Ho ls t . 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 Chicagos 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
yearsand 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
hopeand 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 landlords 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: Chicagos 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 s
