A Raisin in the Sun (Public Theater)
Review of the Public Theater’s revival of A Raisin in the Sun in 2022
I’m going to admit, this theatre show was a rather last-minute decision for me. Every time I head up to New York City I always end up booking something last minute because it caught my attention, and this time I found myself gravitating towards the Public Theater.
On my Notion and organization pages online, I’ve always put a picture of Lorraine Hansberry because I knew her history very well and admired the kind of work she put out into the world during her brief lifetime. While I read some of her other plays, I had never read A Raisin in the Sun before, which is wild because that’s her best-known play.
I saw this was happening about two weeks before it went live into production, and when I went onto the site, I was very disappointed to see that tickets were all about $90. So I started poking around for discounts, then realized that the Public has a student program.
Being the broke graduate student I am, I called the theater immediately and placed an order ahead of time for a student ticket, then was given a seat that wasn’t even listed as available on the website.
I was seated in Row L right on the aisle, and the seat to my right was empty but the aisle seat taken. It was a decent seat, I do wish the Public was a bit more inclined with their seating because people’s heads multiple rows in front of me did get in the way.
Onwards with the review!
A Black family in Chicago grapples with a multitude of crises.
A Raisin in the Sun is based on Hansberry’s life, for those who are not aware of the playwright. This was the first play by a Black woman to land a spot on Broadway, towards the end of the 1950s, and it became her magnum opus—Hansberry died tragically young due to a bout of deadly cancer.
But during her youth as a kid in Chicago, her father moved the family to an all-whites neighborhood, buying a house when he really was not welcome, and the discrimination the Hansberry family faced due to it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. This is mirrored in this play, as the Black family in Chicago buys a home in an all-white neighborhood and begins to experience the hostility of their future white neighbors.
Before that, though, we must start at the beginning. This is a multi-generational family living under a single household, with the grandmother seeing visions of her dead husband throughout the play.
The context at the beginning is that he died rather recently, leaving the family with a small fortune of about 10,000 USD in insurance policy. The family has lived in relative poverty up until this point, so this is the chance to change it around.
Walter and Ruth live with the grandmother, and they have a small child named Travis who is rather innocent in this period of time. He’s depicted in a youthful manner, shielded by the adults around him from the issues they’re facing in their everyday life.
Walter is a limo driver and barely makes enough money to make ends meet, so when Ruth becomes pregnant again, the situation becomes a lot more serious than it was initially. The entire family is crammed into a two bedroom house, which, in this production, is literally depicted as falling apart and quite cramped.
A subplot follows the other occupant of the home, Walter’s sister Beneatha, who wants to become a doctor and studies at college. She finds herself tangled with two boys at the school: one of whom is an educated African-American who very much assimilates with white culture at the time, who Walter makes fun of, and an African with hopes of changing his home country.
Beneathea has a choice to make by the end of the play, as her African friend (future husband?) proposes that she join him in Africa in order to open her own practice in his hometown. This decision process becomes more exacerbated when Walter, given half of the inheritance by the grandmother, invests it in a friend, who then runs off with all the money.
The grandmother bought a house in a white neighborhood with the rest of the money because it was cheaper than the Black neighborhood. They are threatened and bribed by the local community to not move in, with their representative literally showing up to their door with contracts and a whole lot of racist lingo to back up his claims.
Regardless, they decide to move into the home despite all of their losses, which leads to a devastating choice in this production: it shows Travis, with his little backpack, standing in front of a home with a slur spray painted all over it. I genuinely started crying on the way home because of this scene—that’s how bad it affected me.
Overall Thoughts
I heard purists of the script might not be fans of this version, but I enjoyed the production overall. There was a corny moment when Walter’s monologue breaks the third wall and he literally pulls out a playbill and tosses it to an usher waiting in the wings, which was a bit of a strange decision to me.
But all of the actors, especially the grandmother, kid, and Walter were all very good at what they were doing on-stage. Having known the plot beforehand, but never reading the script and having seen a play or movie version of it, I thought that this production was pretty good.
I say see it if you can get a discount. Rumor has it this might transfer to Broadway, so we might see it on the Broadway stages eventually, but I thought I was seeing a Broadway level show to be honest. The acting was solid, so was the set and direction. It’s a Hansberry play—if you do it right, you’ve done it well. And this revival certain did it right.
Follow me on Instagram and Goodreads below.
