A Raisin in the Sun at
the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
The
greatest achievement of the modern playwright is a play in which everyone is
right.
Throughout
the twentieth century, plays increasingly became moral conversations and arguments,
with one character always clearly holding the advantage and—usually—emerging
superior. In Death of a Salesman, the old and the dying are in the wrong and
must make way for the new. In Glengarry Glen Ross, another play about
salesmen, those who would succumb to corporate conformity are the villains, and
those who would fight for their individuality are our heroes. The point of view of the hero in any given
play is usually that of the playwright, and the villain’s ideals are the ideals
of those the playwright wishes to bring down.
As such, many modern plays play out as slow takedowns of an ideology in
which one side is obviously misguided and the other guided by wit and
intelligence.
In Lorraine
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the
ideologically diverse Younger family has many points to make. Mama, the family’s matriarch, believes in
pride and godliness, while Ruth, her daughter-in-law, will take the survival of
her family over anything else. Eldest
son Walter Lee wants to claw away from the trials of his race to a life of
success through a series of well-intentioned but doomed business investments;
his sister, Beneatha, a rapid convert to an early wave of Black Power, wants
dignity, and to bring her race up with her.
The amazing thing about this play is that, though each Younger is vastly
different from the other, each has legitimate points to make, and not one of
their belief systems is incomprehensible to the audience.
I personally have always taken
Beneatha’s side—she’s ambitious, intellectual, and beyond petty argument—but
the audience at the new Broadway production of the show, which runs through
June 15th, seemed partial to Mama, played by the capable LaTanya
Richardson Jackson. After Beneatha
(Anika Noni Rose, magnificent) boldly reveals her atheism to her pious mother,
Mama smacks her daughter across the face and demands that she repeat the words,
“In my mother’s house there is still God.”
Disturbingly, this was followed by applause from the audience—is lack of
belief still as offensive to a 2014 crowd as it would have been to a 1959
one? Still, it was their right to side
with any family member they wished. This
is the magic of A Raisin in the Sun,
and any well-produced production—like this one—displays to the world
Hansberry’s ability as a playwright to present multiple arguments and sound
authoritative in all of them.
Though every Younger’s ideas are
legitimate, this is one of the many plays that disproves the common adage,
“There are no small parts, only small actors.”
Ruth has always been a relatively boring, underwritten part that seems
to exist only to be abused by Walter Lee, and the seemingly wooden Sophie Okonedo
can’t do much with what she’s given here.
Same goes for Jason Dirden as the stiff George Murchison and Bryce Clyde
Jenkins as Travis Younger. But Hansberry
seems to have written some of the parts to necessitate star turns, and, as
usual with productions of this play, Walter Lee walks away with it.
Denzel
Washington is so marvelously good as Walter Lee that every second he is
offstage is an emptiness in the room.
His blasé, discontented approach to the character is inspired. When commanding racist community board member
Karl Lindner to “Get out of my house” in the second act, it’s not shouted; in
fact, it’s almost a whisper. But it’s so
strained and stressed that the threat comes across much more clearly. On the other side of the spectrum, his
rock-bottom moment comes when he describes to his mother how he plans on
selling their newly bought house to Lindner, and he convulses into an
impression of a minstrel show Jim Crow, contorting his body in an angry
jackknife that lets us know exactly what Walter is feeling. His performance is a tour-de-force that
exists on par with Hansberry’s writing.
Whatever the production’s faults, when Washington works hand-in-hand
with this script, the sky is the limit.
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