This story was originally published by the Hyde Park Herald.
When Gabrielle Randle-Bent, Court’s Theatre’s senior artistic producer, realized last season that the theater had never produced anything written by South Side native Lorraine Hansberry, it “felt like an inevitability” that she would direct something of Hansberry’s.
“It didn’t feel like the typical choice,” Randle-Bent said more than sixty years after Hansberry’s death. “It became very clear that we couldn’t wait any longer.”
The wait is over—“A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry’s famed 1957 play set on the South Side, is running at Court now through March 2. With deep ties to the community, it’s a production, Randle-Bent said, that comes after years of work to bring more Black stories to Court.
“A lot of people had to do a lot of hard work in order to make this a place where we felt comfortable taking this on,” she said. “Anybody can tell this story, but not everybody can tell this story to the people whose story it is.”
The story is a study of a working-class Black family in the late 1940s. When the patriarch of the Younger family dies, leaving behind a $10,000 life insurance check (adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $130,000 today), three generations of the family allow themselves to dream of a better life. The aspirations are varied: Walter wants to invest it in a liquor store, Beneatha wants to use it for her education and Lena, their mother, wants to buy a home in an all-white neighborhood. The title comes from Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” in which he asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
The first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, “A Raisin in the Sun” is partly inspired by Hansberry’s own experience growing up in a racially segregated Woodlawn. In 1937, Hansberry’s father, Carl Hansberry, mortgaged a three-flat in the neighborhood in an attempt to challenge the area’s restrictive covenants, which barred Black people from leasing or buying any property in the community. The home, located just a few blocks south of Washington Park, was subject to swift backlash—neighbors violently evicted the family, throwing their things out into the street.
Undeterred, Carl Hansberry embarked on a three-year legal battle for the right to return to his home, arguing his case before the Supreme Court in Hansberry vs. Lee in 1940. The case was a success—the court ruled that the Hansberrys had a right to the property, and made an additional approximately 500 parcels of land in Woodlawn available to Black people.
But her father’s legacy was a complicated one. A real estate speculator, his expansion of the kitchenette apartment—small units made by subdividing buildings, cramming as many as seven or eight families into a space previously occupied by two—earned him the moniker the “Kitchenette King.” Largely occupied by working-class Black people newly arrived from the South, kitchenettes were infamous on the South Side for their cramped spaces (often no larger than 100 square feet), lack of heat and pest infestations.
The kitchenette, where the Youngers dream of leaving, is a space Randle-Bent describes as “the antagonist of this play.”
“[These] beautiful pieces of classical architecture were divided and carved into barely habitable spaces for migrating Black families,” she said. “We hear the vacuum cleaner, we hear the toilet, we hear the water run, we hear the people outside. They’re not alone, which is a beautiful thing, but then they also don’t have enough space, which is an impossible thing.”
Kitchenette apartments feature heavily in Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” as well as Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1953 novella “Maud Martha,” the latter of which was a big source of inspiration for Randle-Bent.
The backdrop, she added, is not “a dramaturgical abstraction,” but rather a place many audience members, especially those from the South Side, are going to be intimately familiar with.
“Our audiences are going to be able to come in and see their grandmother’s living room,” she said.
Though the play carries a universal message—it has been translated into thirty-five languages and performed in more than thirty countries—Randle-Bent said audiences may miss a few particularities specific to Chicago. These include details such as early industrial craftsmanship which gave the city five architectural styles and the building boom that followed the Great Chicago Fire, many of which were later carved into kitchenettes.
Though this is the first time “A Raisin in the Sun” will take the stage at Court, the theater did previously put on a production of “Raisin,” a musical adaptation written by Charlotte Zaltzberg and Robert B. Nemiroff, Hansberry’s husband.
In reinterpreting the play for Court, Randle-Bent said its South Side roots take center stage in myriad ways.
“This isn’t a show where we had to go out and find the community,” she said.
All but one cast member grew up in Chicago, most of them on the South and West sides. Because of this, Randle-Bent said, each cast member brings their own history and valuable expertise to the show.
“This isn’t just a classic. It’s ours, and it’s our audiences’ and it’s this place’s show,” she said. “The ability to honor this play in this place with that expertise just felt like a really, really special gift.”
J. Nicole Brooks, who plays Mrs. Johnson, the Youngers’ nosy neighbor, grew up in Washington Park and started her professional acting career on Court’s stage in 1998. “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play she ever read.
“The connection for me was knowing these people, these characters on an intimate level, knowing them without having to know what the text or the dialogue said,” Brooks said.
She added that Hansberry, a Black woman and lesbian, and Hansberry’s work have long been “a beacon” for her. Brooks came out of semi-acting retirement when Randle-Bent reached out to her about playing Mrs. Johnson, who she described as both a “clown” and a “messenger.”
“The clown is not there to make the audience laugh, the clown is there to remain truthful to themselves, and the laugh only comes because they are invested in that truth,” Brooks explained. She grew up around similar characters who could “make you laugh at some of the darkest” things.
In addition to her role at Court, Randle-Bent is a senior lecturer in theater and performance studies at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. candidate in theater at Northwestern University, where she studies and writes about Hansberry.
Though her research focuses more on Hansberry’s final play, “Le Blanc,” she reflected that in her own recent move to North Kenwood, she realized exactly where the author had been situated.
“Her brilliance was so often from the place of an outside looking in,” she said, referring to Hansberry’s middle-class upbringing. “What you have is this play, you sort of take it at face value. But when you’re here you can really see that it is written by the little girl sitting in the back seat of the car while her dad got out to collect the rent.”
The youngest of four children, Hansberry left college to pursue writing in New York, first as a newspaper staffer, and then later full-time. In 1957, at age twenty-nine, she wrote “A Raisin in the Sun,” which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and was nominated for four Tony Awards. She died only a few years later at the age of thirty-four.
Throughout the play’s run, Court is hosting a bevy of community programming around the neighborhood and city.
The public programming includes a community reading series, a conversation about the history of housing justice with the National Public Housing Museum and an art-making opportunity with the Hyde Park Art Center. There will also be a screening of the 1971 film “Bushman,” which is about an African academic who immigrates to America, at the Logan Center, 915 E. 60th St.
Reflecting on the play’s themes, Kamilah Rashied, the director of engagement for Court, said the Youngers represent countless Black families who were subjected to restrictive covenants, predatory lending and redlining.
“So much of the plot of this play is about a family trying to reconcile their dreams, their own personal dreams, their own family legacy—trying to reconcile that dream with the American nightmare of discrimination,” she told the Herald. “We’re still trying to do that work.”
The play is “connected to much bigger things about belonging in America—who gets to belong, and the idea that part of that belonging, the way that you buy your way into that dream of belonging is home ownership,” she added.
With the performance and subsequent programming, Rashied said, Court aims to give people a place to consider what happens when laws—whether the rule of law or unspoken social rules—get in the way of dreams.
“I think there are lots of reasons for us to be reconsidering those questions right now,” she said.
Zoe Pharo is a staff writer at the Hyde Park Herald.