“Once upon a time, freedom used to be life — now it’s money.”
“No. It was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it.”
When “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry first hit the stage in 1959, it became both a critical success and a cultural watershed. Ms. Hansberry, then a struggling playwright living in New York’s East Village, was suddenly the first Black female playwright to have a show on Broadway — and overnight, her story of hopeless dreams not only broke the barriers of American theater but redefined them.
Now, 65 years after its debut, “A Raisin in the Sun” remains a mirror to the racial and economic struggles that still shape our society — and the production taking place at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre refuses to look away.
Walter Lee Younger is an unstoppable force who meets an immovable object. A young Black man living in a cramped apartment with his family on the South Side of Chicago, Walter is desperate to rise above his circumstances and thrashing against a world determined to keep him in place. His dreams of wealth and success aren’t just personal ambitions, but rebellions in themselves — they are small acts of defiance in a society that he feels denies him opportunity at every turn.
He’s a loose cannon and a drunk, but your heart aches at the genuine anguish evident in every word he utters, shouts or sobs. He pleads with his family members to believe in him, to support his dreams or to respect him as a man, and is met each time with logical-yet-cold dismissal (He moans to his wife Ruth, “A man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: ‘Eat your eggs!’”). He is a man at war: with the world, with his family and with himself.
The women in Walter’s family, meanwhile, each carry their own impossible weights. His mother, Lena, serves as the family’s moral compass, nurturing a vision of a life built on home, stability, and fiercely protected dignity. Ruth, Walter’s languishing wife, stoically shoulders the weight of the family’s struggles and turns a carefully blind eye to her own deferred dreams. And Beneatha, his outspoken younger sister, rejects tradition altogether, striving to establish her identity through education and cultural exploration. Each woman suffers in her own way and hopes in another.
The play translates miraculously well into 21st century considerations but perhaps with one exception. Halfway through, it’s revealed that Ruth is pregnant with a second child, to which she responds with panic — and understandably so. Her first son, Travis, sleeps on the couch without his own bedroom, and his parents barely have the 50 cents he needs for a school fee. But Lena’s and Walter’s reactions frame Ruth’s consideration of an abortion as heresy, with Walter’s pride inadvertently positioned as more important than Ruth’s wishes. Hansberry’s narrative then quickly resolves Ruth’s potential abortion with the family’s decision to move to a larger house, reducing the complex decision to an external problem she must overcome to uphold family unity. Of course, the play is about race and class — not stigmas around abortion — and of course the landscape around issues of reproductive rights in the 1950s were vastly different. That being said, one movement should not have to be forfeited for the sake of another.
Even so, “A Raisin in the Sun” remains an uncomfortably realistic story of deferred dreams and a timeless examination of survival, dignity and sacrifice in the face of systemic oppression. While Walter’s ambition, Lena’s devotion, Ruth’s eye-twitching endurance and Beneatha’s defiance each represent different paths to empowerment, they share a common fight against societal forces that seek to diminish them. The central conceit of Hansberry’s play remains a reminder that the pursuit of dreams, deferred or not, is always a radical act.
