A RAISIN IN THE SUN

LIESL TOMMY RETURNS TO THE HUNTINGTON TO HELM “A RAISIN IN THE SUN” – POWERFUL FAMILY CLASSIC ABOUT DEFERRED DREAMS BEGINS MARCH 8
(BOSTON) – Fifty-four years after its Broadway premiere, the Huntington Theatre Company presents A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark family classic about deferred dreams. Liesl Tommy (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Ruined – IRNE Award for Best Director and Production) returns to the Huntington to helm the production that features Leroy McClain (the title role in Hamlet at California Shakespeare Theater) as Walter Lee Younger and Kimberly Scott (Molly Cunningham in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone – Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations) as matriarch Lena Younger.
“Whenever we’re approaching a classic, we do so with the director in mind,” says Huntington Artistic Director Peter DuBois. “Liesl Tommy’s powerful Ruined and her fresh approach to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom are two of the most artistically exciting productions of recent memory at the Huntington, and I look forward to her bringing her perspective to one of the greatest American plays ever written.” Hear more from Peter DuBois about the production at huntingtontheatre.org/peter-raisin.
Hailed by The New York Times as “a play that changed American theatre forever,” A Raisin in the Sun is a fiercely moving portrait of the Younger family – Walter, his wife Ruth, son Travis, mother Lena, and sister Beneatha – packed into a tiny apartment on Chicago’s South Side. They yearn for a better life, and an impending insurance payment could be the key: for Beneatha, an education; for Walter, a business of his own; for Lena, the stability and legacy of homeownership. When Lena takes steps to buy a house in an all-white neighborhood, a racist representative offers to pay the family not to move, and Walter is faced with the choice of erasing past financial mistakes or finally seizing the American Dream so long deferred.
“My father was an urban planner who worked on low-income housing in Boston, and we often talked about how destructive to family life tiny apartments can be,” recalls director Liesl Tommy. “With this production, I’m looking to explore just how desperate poverty can make you when you don’t have the space to be yourself.”
Hansberry’s groundbreaking classic was inspired by her father Carl’s battle to move his family to an all-white neighborhood of Chicago in 1938. After the family took up residency, their neighbors fought to remove them by citing a restrictive covenant they had signed to keep African-Americans out. When the Illinois Supreme Court ruled against the family in 1940, Carl appealed to the US Supreme Court in 1940. The Court’s ruling secured the Hansberrys’ residency, but unready to address the underling civil rights issue, was silent on the legality of restrictive covenants.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African-American or directed by an African-American to premiere on Broadway. Despite first touring to successful reviews, it took producer Philip Rose more than a year to raise the money to mount it. The production received four Tony Award nominations in 1960 (Best Play, Actor, Actress, Direction) and has been revived and adapted for the screen to great acclaim. It received the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play. Having been in continuous production for more than 50 years, the play has become a cultural trope for how we think about the American Dream.
“A Raisin in the Sun asks us to examine the human condition and what it means to be human,” says Joi Gresham, Executive Director and Literary Trustee of The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust. “How much can we distance a man or a woman from their dreams and aspirations – for themselves, for their children – and still expect them to maintain their dignity and humanity?”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leroy McClain (the title role in Hamlet at California Shakespeare Theater) as Walter Lee Younger and Kimberly Scott (Molly Cunningham in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone – Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations) as Lena Younger lead the cast that also features Corey Allen (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Huntington) as George Murchison; Jason Bowen (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Ruined at the Huntington) as Joseph Asagai; Ashley Everage (Fen and In the Blood at Rutgers Theater Company) as Ruth Younger; Will McGarrahan (Next Fall and The Drowsy Chaperone at SpeakEasy Stage Company) as Karl Lindner; Maurice E. Parent (The Mountaintop at the Underground Railway Theater) as Bobo; and Keona Welch (Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry at the Drama League DirectorFest 2012) as Beneatha Younger. Cory Janvier and Zaire White alternate as Travis Younger. Calvin Braxton and Christian Roberts are the Moving Men.
Lorraine Hansberry (Playwright) was a playwright, essayist, poet, and leading literary figure in the civil rights movement.
A Raisin in the Sun won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and made her the first black, youngest person, and fifth woman to win that prize. Her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was produced on Broadway in 1964.
Ms. Hansberry left a number of finished and unfinished writings that indicate the breadth of her social and artistic vision. Robert Nemiroff, whom she had divorced in 1964 but designated as her literary executor, adapted some of her writings for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. He also edited and published an anthology of her work (reissued in 1994) that included Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?. She died from pancreatic cancer in 1965 at the age of 34. A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African-American woman produced on Broadway, has become a classic of the American theatre and has enjoyed numerous professional revivals.
Liesl Tommy (Director) returns to the Huntington having previously directed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Ruined. Her recent credits include the world premieres of Party People by Universes (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), The White Man — A Complex Declaration of Love by Joan Rang (DanskDansk Theatre, Denmark), Peggy Pickett Sees the Face of God by Roland Schimmelpfennig (Luminato Festival/Canadian Stage), Eclipsed by Danai Gurira (Yale Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and McCarter Theatre), The Good Negro by Tracey Scott Wilson (The Public Theater/NYSF and Dallas Theater Center), A History of Light by Eisa Davis (Contemporary American Theatre Festival), Angela’s Mixtape by Eisa Davis (Synchronicity Performance Group, New Georges), A Stone’s Throw by Lynn Nottage (Women’s Project), and Misterioso 119 by Koffi Kwahule (Berkshire Theatre Group and Act French Festival/Lark Theatre). Her productions have won numerous awards for directing, acting, and design. She has taught master classes in acting, directing, and new play development internationally and taught at The Juilliard School, Trinity Rep/Brown University, The Strasberg Institute, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is an artistic associate at Sundance Theatre Institute, a native of Cape Town, South Africa and a graduate of Newton North High School and Trinity Repertory Conservatory.