A Raisin in the Sun – Footnotes
These Footnotes accompany our episode on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and include notes on Nina Simone’s ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, the Hansberry family’s fight for their home, the character of George, and how music underlines different cultural identities for the characters in the play.
Not listened to the episode yet? You’ll find it here.
Young, Gifted and Black
After Hansberry’s death in 1965, her ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, collated her unpublished writings, letters and interviews, and adapted them into a stage play entitled, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words. The play ran off Broadway in 1968, and it was also turned into a successful autobiography of the same title.
The phrase “Young, Gifted and Black” is perhaps better known from Nina Simone’s uplifting song. Simone was a close friend of Hansberry’s – the playwright was godmother to Simone’s only daughter. Simone also credited Hansberry with raising her political consciousness: “We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.”
Simone was inspired to write the song shortly after Nemiroff’s play appeared. In a moving interview clip that one can still watch on YouTube, she described being so inspired by a photograph of her friend Hansberry, that she sat down at the piano and the “tune just flowed out” of her. “She gave it to me”, she said. Simone immediately called up her musical director, Weldon Irvine, and described the feelings she had at that moment about Hansberry, from which he wrote the lyrics. Simone first introduced the song to a crowd of 50,000 at the Harlem Cultural Festival in August 1969.
The lyrics of the song take Hansberry’s dynamic life as inspiration for future generations of young black people: “There’s a million boys and girls / Who are young, gifted and black…tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you.”
Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone 1961
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Restrictive Covenants
We referred in the podcast to the history of Hansberry’s family moving into the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago that was restricted to white people by legal covenant. Such restrictive covenants had been in widespread use in the United States since the 1920s, legally enforcing racial segregation. A direct quote from this kind of covenant reads: “Said premises shall not be rented, leased, or conveyed to, or occupied by, any person other than of the white or Caucasian race.”
In the Hansberry family’s case, the local neighbourhood Improvement Association filed a mandatory injunction for the family to vacate their home, which was granted by a Circuit Court judge and upheld on appeal by the Illinois Supreme Court. Hansberry’s father, Carl, challenged the ruling, which led in 1940 to a landmark decision in his favour at the U.S. Supreme Court. Restrictive property covenants were finally declared unenforceable in 1948 by the Supreme Court, and the Hansberry family house was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2010. Carl Hansberry died in 1946 at the age of 50, and Lorraine later said, “American racism helped kill him”.
In the play, Lena’s decision to buy a house in a white neighbourhood is not a political act – it is simply that this was a house that she could afford, and she above all wants to provide a home for her family. As it turned out in real life, it became an important act of protest.
George
We talked only briefly in the podcast about the character of Beneatha’s wealthy suitor, George Murchison. He is one of the representations of black African-American identity that Hansberry offers in her array of characters. He is a college educated black person, something he has in common with Joseph and Beneatha, and in contrast to Walter, Ruth and Lena. Hansberry is clear that his education does not mean that he is cultured, however. Unlike Beneatha, he does not go to university “to think” as he puts it, but only for the degree that will presumably help advance his economic career. He is set apart from everyone else because he comes from a privileged family, and his views underline the lack of solidarity as defined only by race. As we noted in our conversation, he is confident about his assimilation into white, capitalist American society.
In personal moral terms he is in fact the least progressive character in the play. He is more chauvinist than Joseph in his responses to Beneatha, inverting the stereotype that a modern American would be more enlightened than an African. He is shown to be shallow, and Lena ultimately backs her daughter in rejecting him, regardless of his prospects, calling him “a fool”. But as Tinuke pointed out, he is almost certainly going to be a success, despite or because of his lack of social conscience, so what are we to conclude about assimilation as the way forward for black Americans? It is a debate that remains very much alive.
Gilbert Kyem Jr as George
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, October 2024
Photo by Ikin Yum
Doreene Blackstock as Lena and
Cash Holland as Ruth
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, October 2024
Photo by Ikin Yum
Music in the play
Hansberry underlines the different cultural identities that define her array of black-American characters by associating specific types of music with each of them. The blues that Walter plays on the radio are home-grown, modern American in origin, for example. While Ruth and Lena sing a southern spiritual, affirming Lena’s historic roots. And then finally, Beneatha dances to Nigerian folk music, as she seeks a connection to an even more distant heritage and identity in Africa. The strength of Hansberry’s play is that she showcases all these strands of black American cultural identity in equal measure.
The Texts
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Published 24th August
Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Follow the podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | TuneIn | RSS | Follow the podcast
Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
0 Comments