A Raisin in the Sun

I first read Lorraine Hansbury’s play in high school, and still today I think it’s a powerful response to Langston Hughes’s poem. This play is a true Greek tragedy, but with an extra act. It’s…the saddest movie ever to have a happy ending (and ending which I think, despite the film’s misguided final music, is ominous at best). Hansbury does a beautiful job imaging a single family’s myriad disappointments in the face of a deeply tragic history, and woeful economic hardship. Though I haven’t read this play since, I remember very clearly the piteous and hateful Karl Linder, who so obsequiously tries to tell the Youngers they aren’t wanted in their new neighborhood. But there are many details I had forgotten—most of all Beneatha, whose chaotic interests (that made her seem so flighty to me as an adolescent) now look like a surprisingly lighthearted examination of many perspectives on the question of evolving African American identity. Hughes experimented with all of these extremes, whereas Hansbury herself seems to settle in a modest version of the American dream:

“We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors.”

The Youngers are decent people, and just want some time and space to live as such. The rich debates about black identity, the agenda of the NAACP, though all valuable, aren’t practical for them. They want little more than a little peace. The other aspect of this that escaped me till tonight is the somewhat sad turn around gender at the end. The strength of this play has always seemed to me to be its three strong central female characters, though tonight I noticed how clearly the play is really about one boy becoming a man. I feel a little cheated by that, but certainly it’s a good opportunity for Poitier to make speeches. Oh right. Poitier. Did I mention I’m reviewing the movie and not the play? Yeah. I am. As hard as it is to watch and as disappointing as I find the end, I do still love this movie. [photo: This movie is so much sadder than it looks.]