The play unfolds in the single setting of the family’s shabby, rat-infested apartment on Chicago’s Southside. Together, the cast really succeeds in drawing out Hansberry’s humour, and thus the play’s often jarring shifts between comedy, satire and tragedy.ĭesigner Mel Page has created an honest rendering of the family’s shabby, rat-infested apartment. Samuels and Zahra Newman (as Ruth Younger) both give particularly compelling performances, and Nancy Denis is hilarious as their nosy neighbour Mrs Johnson. The rapport among the actors, including those in more minor roles, is palpable. Hansberry’s scathing narrative of postwar American race relations stands up well to the test of time, and this production, directed by Wesley Enoch, is superb. Board of Education ruling, which put an end to legal school segregation, and four years after the Montgomery bus boycott, this just might be, as Black poet Amiri Baraka declared it, the “quintessential civil rights drama”.Ī must-read list: The enduring contributions of African American women writers Written five years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v.

Joseph Mayers/Sydney Theatre CompanyĪcross a compressed several weeks, A Raisin in the Sun traces the hopes and dashed dreams of three generations of the African American Younger family, headed by matriarch, Lena (Gayle Samuels). A Raisin in the Sun is a stalwart in the American literary canon.

A raisin in the sun drama