Even the feeble houseplant, symbolically undernourished in the light-deprived apartment, is promised a new life. Beginning with the indignities of “ghetto-itus” - there are just two bedrooms for the three generations and a bathroom shared with neighbors down the hall - the play ends with them all moving out. And in dramatizing the effects of that backlash on Walter Lee, the feckless dreamer of the family, it offers a piercing psychological portrait of Black manhood in distress.Īs was customary in her time, Hansberry prioritizes the real estate plot, wrapping Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister and son) in its ultimately hopeful arms.
In telling the story of the Youngers, a Black family aiming to move from a “rat trap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side to a house in a working-class white neighborhood, it both reports on and anticipates the racist backlash to upward mobility that has been a blight on American life since Reconstruction. It’s not as if the play needed help to feel relevant like all great works it has proved itself incessantly timely. How, then, to make it new? Apparently, on the evidence of this staging, by furiously underlining its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, a reversal of standard procedure that produces a sometimes stunning, sometimes stunted result.
Yet on Tuesday the Public opened O’Hara’s take on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: not merely a revival but a further “exploration” of an earlier production of a 1959 classic that is arguably as well known today as it was epochal when it debuted.
Leaving his recent “ Long Day’s Journey Into Night” aside, Robert O’Hara doesn’t typically direct revivals nor, leaving Shakespeare aside, does the Public Theater typically produce them.
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