lorraine hansberry's play a raisin in the sun

Kelundra Smith recalled reading and directing a production of Raisin in high school, and wondering at the time “what the original dream was that got deferred. Really just thinking about the way that we’re taught canonical literature as one of those systems of power-who gets to be in the canon and who doesn’t.”

“I’m from Southern Appalachia, in North Georgia,” Belfower explained, “and was thinking a lot about what it is to come of age in a rural place, what it is to come of age in the church, and to be given a series of rules for your life and expectations for what things are supposed to look like. Riffs? Homages? Responses? Indictments? Whatever the nomenclature, there’s an undeniable appeal for playwrights to engage in conversation with, even dispute, earlier works.īelflower, whose John Proctor is now having its premiere at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., said that her look at how present-day students respond to reading The Crucible had its genesis in the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017 and her simultaneous reading of Stacy Schiff’s new history of the infamous colonial trials, The Witches: Salem 1692. There is no universally agreed upon term for plays that take off from prior works, which date back at least to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and more recently saw the unexpected return of Nora Helmer in Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2. Yet playwrights seem inexorably drawn back to her seminal A Raisin in the Sun, and the results have been works that expand on the story of the Younger family and their home from a variety of angles: Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, Kwame Kwei-Armah‘s Beneatha’s Place, Kelundra Smith‘s Younger, Robert O’Hara‘s The Etiquette of Vigilance.Ī similar kind of expansion and exploration of canonical work seems to spring up around the works of Arthur Miller, yielding both plays which extrapolate new stories rooted in the original, such as Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman, or which seek to reframe Miller by imagining present-day people exploring his plays, as characters do with The Crucible in both Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain and Sheri Wilner’s Kingdom City.

In an era when movie theatres are dominated by the endless permutations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the notion of a Lorraine Hansberry Multiverse seems like either a highbrow parody or copyright quagmire.

Lorraine hansberry's play a raisin in the sun