A Raisin in the Sun

This is the most complete edition of
A Raisin in the Sun
ever published. Like the American Playhouse production for television, it restores to the play two scenes unknown to the general public, and a number of other key scenes and passages staged for the first time in twenty-fifth anniversary revivals and, most notably, the Roundabout Theatre’s Kennedy Center production on which the television picture is based.

“The events of every passing year add resonance to
A Raisin in the Sun
. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic”; “… one of a handful of great American dramas … 
A Raisin in the Sun
belongs in the inner circle, along with
Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey into Night
, and
The Glass Menagerie.”
So wrote
The New York Times
and the
Washington Post
respectively of Harold Scott’s revelatory stagings for the Roundabout in which most of these elements, cut on Broadway, were restored. The unprecedented resurgence of the work (a dozen regional revivals at this writing, new publications and productions abroad, and now the television production that will be seen by millions) prompts the new edition.

Produced in 1959, the play presaged the revolution in black and women’s consciousness—and the revolutionary ferment in Africa—that exploded in the years following the playwright’s death in 1965 to ineradicably alter the social fabric and consciousness of the nation and the world. As so many have commented lately, it did so in a manner and to an extent that few could have foreseen, for not only the restored material, but much else that passed unnoticed in the play at the time, speaks to issues that are now inescapable: value systems of the black family; concepts of African American beauty and identity; class and generational conflicts; the relationships of husbands and wives, black men and women; the outspoken (if then yet unnamed) feminism of the daughter; and, in the penultimate scene between Beneatha and Asagai, the larger statement of the play—and the ongoing struggle it portends.

Not one of the cuts, it should be emphasized, was made to dilute or censor the play or to “soften” its statement, for everyone in that herculean, now-legendary band that brought
Raisin
to Broadway—and most specifically the producer, Philip Rose, and director, Lloyd Richards—
believed
in the importance of that statement with a degree of commitment that would have countenanced nothing of the kind. How and why, then, did the cuts come about?

The scene in which Beneatha unveils her natural haircut is an interesting example. In 1959, when the play was presented, the rich variety of Afro styles introduced in the mid-sixties had not yet arrived: the very few black women who wore their hair unstraightened cut it very short. When the hair of Diana Sands (who created the role) was cropped in this fashion, however, a few days before the opening, it was not contoured to suit her: her particular facial structure required a fuller Afro, of the sort she in fact adopted in later years. Result? Rather than vitiate the playwright’s point—the beauty of black hair—the scene was dropped.

Some cuts were similarly the result of happenstance or unpredictables of the kind that occur in any production: difficulties with a scene, the “processes” of actors, the dynamics of staging, etc. But most were related to the length of the play: running time. Time in the context of bringing to Broadway the first play by a black (young and unknown) woman, to be directed, moreover, by another unknown black “first,” in a theater were black audiences virtually did not exist—and where, in the entire history of the American stage, there had never been a serious
commercially successful
black drama!

So unlikely did the prospects seem in that day, in fact,
to all but Phil Rose and the company, that much as some expressed admiration for the play, Rose’s eighteen-month effort to find a co-producer to help complete the financing was turned down by virtually every established name in the business. He was joined at the last by another newcomer, David Cogan, but even with the money in hand, not a single theater owner on the Great White Way would
rent
to the new production! So that when the play left New York for tryouts—with a six-hundred-dollar advance in New Haven and no theater to come back to—had the script and performance been any less ready, and the response of critics and audiences any less unreserved than they proved to be,
A Raisin in the Sun
would never have reached Broadway.

Under these circumstances the pressures were enormous (if unspoken and rarely even acknowledged in the excitement of the work)
not
to press fate unduly with unnecessary risks. And the most obvious of these was the running time. It is one thing to present a four-and-a-half-hour drama by Eugene O’Neill on Broadway—but a
first
play (even ignoring the special features of this one) in the neighborhood of even
three
??? By common consensus, the need to keep the show as tight and streamlined as possible was manifest. Some things—philosophical flights, nuances the general audience might not understand, shadings, embellishments—would have to be sacrificed.

At the time the cuts were made (there were also some very good ones that focused and strengthened the drama), it was assumed by all that they would in no way significantly affect or alter the statement of the play, for there is nothing in the omitted lines that is not implicit elsewhere in, and throughout,
A Raisin in the Sun
. But to think this was to reckon without two factors the future would bring into play. The first was the swiftness and depth of the revolution in consciousness that was coming and the consequent, perhaps inevitable, tendency of some people to assume, because the “world” had changed, that
any
“successful” work which preceded the change must embody the values they had outgrown. And the second was the nature of the American audience.

James Baldwin has written that “Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred.” He is referring to that apparently endless capacity we have nurtured through long years to deceive ourselves where race is concerned: the baggage of myth and preconception we carry with us that enables northerners, for example, to shield themselves from the extent and virulence of segregation in the North, so that each time an “incident” of violence so egregious that they cannot look past it occurs they are “shocked” anew, as if it had never happened before or as if the problem were largely passé. (In 1975, when the cast of
Raisin
, the musical, became involved in defense of a family whose home in Queens, New York City, had been fire-bombed, we learned of a 1972 City Commissioner of Human Rights Report, citing “eleven cases
in the last eighteen months
in which minority-owned homes had been set afire or vandalized, a church had been bombed, and a school bus had been attacked”—in New York City!)

But Baldwin is referring also to the human capacity, where a work of art is involved, to substitute, for what the writer has written, what in our hearts we
wish
to believe. As Hansberry put it in response to one reviewer’s enthusiastic if particularly misguided praise of her play: “… it did not disturb the writer in the least that there is no such implication in the entire three acts. He did not need it in the play; he had it in his head.”
¹

Such problems did not, needless to say, stop America from embracing
A Raisin in the Sun
. But it did interfere drastically, for a generation, with the way the play was interpreted and assessed—and, in hindsight, it made all the more regrettable the abridgment (though without it would we even know the play today?). In a remarkable rumination on Hansberry’s death, Ossie Davis (who succeeded Sidney Poitier in the role of Walter Lee) put it this way: