Revived, "Raisin" Shines in the Sun

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry spent her childhood watching her father fight an expensive and exhausting legal battle in order to allow their family to move into a neighborhood that was at the time closed off to African-Americans. Hansberry’s experiences would inspire her most famous play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which is now playing at the Boston University Theater through April 7. Set against the background of postwar Chicago, “A Raisin in the Sun” centers around a family whose dreams far exceed the narrow limits of their reality. Directed by Liesl Tommy, Huntington Theater Company’s production is no less relevant over 50 years after the play’s publication—the cast’s complex portrayals of their characters convey the pain and ignominy of coming up against a system that is determined to thwart any hope of escape.

The Youngers are a multigenerational African-American family crammed into a too-small apartment in Chicago. But a check in the mail provides the promise of escape: family matriarch Lena (Kimberly Scott) plans to use some of the money from her husband’s life insurance policy to purchase the family a new home. To add to the complication, her son Walter (LeRoy McClain) has dreams of opening up a liquor store, and his sister Beneatha (Keona Welch) needs the money to get through medical school. Walter’s wife, Ruth (Ashley Everage), captures all facets of her character’s complex personality: she conveys Ruth’s tender, loving side even while scolding her son and dealing with the stress of moving into an all-white neighborhood. The Youngers hope that this move to a prosperous neighborhood will provide them with greater happiness; instead, they become embroiled in arguments among themselves and with the neighborhood association.

The cast is extremely capable, and the acting is almost universally excellent—the many relationships are rendered evocatively to create a mood of constant tension. Welch captures Beneatha’s sense of self-entitlement at the beginning of the play—with her family clearly strapped for cash, she indulges in one expensive hobby after another—as well as her gradual shift away from egotism. And Scott as Lena, the family’s anchor, rolls with the punches as they come, too distracted by attending to the troubles of others to deal with her own pain. Each actress’s disposition plays out most elegantly in the scene where Ruth reveals that she is pregnant—Beneatha smiles unconvincingly but cannot conceal her selfish anger, Lena tries desperately to smooth everything over with comforting words, and Ruth sits in stony silence before breaking down, crushed by the fact that her life has spun so completely out of her own control.

Though incredibly strong overall, the acting was not without hiccups. At the start of the play, McClain’s Walter lacks the ease that the other actors have with their characters. He is too gruff, too quick to raise his voice—so much anger so soon in the play is off-putting and prevents his character from being sympathetic. But he smooths this out later on, tapping into Walter’s kinder side when, for example, he and Everage dance together in the kitchen. After this scene, Walter has demonstrated his best side, and it is all the more affecting when he acts his meanest later on. Though his performance started off rough, McClain’s portrayal of Walter does succeed in creating sympathy, and his rendering of Walter’s disintegration is truly harrowing; despite his shouted affirmations of being fine, the fact that he is broken-spirited is clear.

The chemistry between Walter and his mother Lena gives their conflict many layers. McClain and Scott play well off each other; in one of their best scenes together, Scott mourns the generational gap that she sees emerging between herself and her children, lamenting, “Now you and Beneatha talk about things we ain't never thought about. You ain't satisfied or proud of nothing we done.” Had McClain and Welch failed to give their characters depth, these lines would have come off as a straightforward complaint about the failings of the new generation. But the actors’ interactions and intensity reveal a deeper meaning in the line: as angry as Lena is, she’s also desperately afraid of being left behind.

One of the play’s most striking directorial choices was something that, while not called for in the script, fit into the play as perfectly as if Hansberry had written it herself. The ghost of the father, whose life insurance payment sparks the play’s dramatic action, soundlessly wanders the stage throughout the scenes. Possibly the most poetic moment of the play comes when he finds his wife surveying their empty house: tenderly but wordlessly, he drapes her coat over her shoulders. The ghost’s presence provides a physical tether to the past, from which the play’s plot springs. Much of the time, he fades into the background, but at other times, his presence adds a sense of menace and heightens the tension in the apartment.

Throughout the three-hour play, the cast delivers a dynamic performance that traces the characters’ evolution and never flags in its vitality. The skilled cast leaves the audience with a searching portrayal of the cost exacted from those who dare to rise above their circumstances.

—Staff writer Erica X. Eisen can be reached at eeisen@college.harvard.edu.