A RAISIN IN THE SUN by Lorraine Hansberry

What the critics say about the play:

Without question, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most important plays ever written about Chicago. Emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative, it vividly shows an African-American family’s struggles to escape the shackles of segregation on the city’s South Side. (Playbill Interview with Imani Perry)

[Hansberry] demonstrates a keen awareness of the multiple ways in which people of African descent in the United States have fought for their right to live with dignity, calling into question the idea that there is any difference at all between radical and respectable resistance. (Criterion Collection)

Hansberry’s creation of an array of complex characters who represent the dreams of working-class, urban, postwar black communities offered a nuanced view of African American life to a mainstream audience. [...] A Raisin in the Sun reminds us that our strategies for resistance must be as varied as the oppressions that threaten to derail our ability to live with joy, courage, and dignity. (Criterion Collection)

A Raisin in the Sun engages with many issues that remain salient for African American people nearly two decades into the twenty-first century. Hansberry draws attention to gender, class, and generational tensions within black communities, relationships between African Americans and Africans in America, competing definitions of progress and success, and the ways in which structural racism affects the everyday lives of black people. (Criterion Collection)

A Raisin in the Sun is a great American play not because it was one of the first to deal with the subject of race, but because Hansberry captured the heart of human conflict on three separate levels: the first, of course, was the issue of racial integration in the 1950’s; the second is the drama of a man trying to improve his life and running aground; finally, however, it is a play about the very nature of love. In one of the great speeches of the American theater, Lena Younger, facing an impending schism in her family, asks her daughter, “When do you think is the time to love somebody the most?” Too often, the correct answer is elusive. (Huffpost)