Historical and Cultural Contexts: Use the video board below to explore Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking play. As you view, make notes. You will use this information as we read the play to formulate Essential Questions that the play poses.
Embedded Files
Productions of A Raisin in the Sun on stage and in film, from the original 1959 with Sidney Portier, to Broadway's 2014 revival with Denzel Washington.
PBS episode "Redlining and Racial Covenants: Jim Crow of the North" and WGN Channel 9 in Chicago both define and explain the process of "redlining" and housing discrimination via racial "land covenants" that legally barred minority homebuyers from certain neighborhoods.
Two videos sharing information about Lorraine Hansberry's personal life and the influence that life had on her writing of the play.
Learn about The Great Migration of African Americans moving from the rural South to Northern cities. The MOMA in NYC explores the topic via a new exhibit of paintings & poetry.
"Harlem" by Langston Hughes
Annotation and theme statements- how does each description describe a different reaction to the deferred dream?
TITLE inspiration- what can we expect of the play, based on the poem?
Setting the Stage: Read the first scene's opening stage directions. Make a list of words and phrases that establish the TONE. Consider the FRQ3 Prompt from 1972:
In retrospect, the reader often discovers that the first chapter of a novel or the opening scene of a drama introduces some of the major themes of the work. Write an essay about the opening scene of a drama or the first chapter of a novel in which you explain how it functions in this way.
Read the rest of Act I scene 1. Taken together with the TITLE allusion to the Langston Hughes' poem, consider how A Raisin in the Sun would be a strong candidate for this essay.
"Those Winter Sundays" reading
"Those Winter Sundays" reading
by Robert Hayden (Read by Kevin Young)
"Those Winter Sundays" analysis
"Those Winter Sundays" analysis
by Kevin Young
In many works of fiction, houses take on symbolic importance. Such houses may be literal houses or unconventional ones (e.g., hotels, hospitals, monasteries, or boats). Either from your own reading or from the list below, choose a work of fiction in which a literal or unconventional house serves as a significant symbol. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how this house contributes to an interpretation of the work as a whole.
How does A Raisin in the Sun employ the Faustian Bargain trope? How does this moment in the play illuminate theme and character development? How does it answer one of the Essential Questions of the play?
Mentor Language Activity
In preparation for Friday's essay, read the linked reviews for different productions of A Raisin in the Sun. These reviews will of course contain description of the acting/production itself, but what you want to pay attention to is the writing about the PLAY: its characters, themes, and essential questions. Record in your journal, 3 Mentor Sentences/Phrases- this is language that is constructed in a way that you'd like to emulate in your own writing. Maybe they use particularly spot on verbs, or they have a balanced structure you appreciate; for whatever reason, these are sentences or phrases that can serve as an example for good analysis.
“Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. Black people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.”
James Baldwin, writing about A Raisin in the Sun in his introduction to Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 1969
Click the image above to visit the Gordon Parks Foundation website feature on the film adaptation of Hansberry's groundbreaking play.
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