664 The American Century: Literature since 1945does it explode?” Hansberry called her play, a dramatization of dreams deferred
that threaten to explode, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
A Raisin in the Sun has been compared to Native Son. Set in a black, Chicagoan,
working-class environment, it explores as Richard Wright’s novel does the
frustrations and struggles that are determined by the primary fact of race. It even
opens in the same explosive way: with the sound of an alarm clock, that seems to
herald crisis and to call on the audience to pay attention. While Hansberry investigates
many of the same issues as Wright – the relation of material wealth to human dignity,
the crippling consequences of poverty and racial prejudice, the conflict between
separation and assimilation – she does so in a different key, a more hopeful register.
The dramatic premise is simple. An insurance benefit of ten thousand dollars paid
on the death of the father of the household becomes the source of conflict within the
Younger family as Mama Lena Younger, the widow, beneficiary, and matriarch,
argues with her son, Walter Younger, Jr., over its use. Not only does the premise allow
Hansberry to unravel the tensions within the family, tensions that are clearly
symptomatic of differences within the African-American community as a whole,
it enables her to suggest the intimacy of their shared experience – and their ultimate
solidarity in the face of white prejudice and oppression. In the end, resisting white
threats and attempts at bribery, Walter Younger, Jr. goes along with his mother’s
desire to move from their cramped apartment into a white neighborhood. “We come
from people who had a lot of pride,” Walter tells a white man who tries to dissuade
the Younger family from becoming his neighbors. “We have decided to move into
our house because my father – my father – he earned it.” “He finally come into his
manhood today, didn’t he?” Mama Lena proudly observes of her son. “Kind of like a
rainbow after the rain ...” Working together, despite their disputes and differences,
they end the play preparing for the move that will change their lives, perhaps for
good, perhaps for ill, probably both. The dream is no longer deferred.
Hansberry never wrote a play to equal A Raisin in the Sun. Another work, The Sign
in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), about the vacillation of a Jewish intellectual
between disenchantment and commitment, was produced with only moderate
success. Other work, which showed her edging toward feminist issues and the
discovery of her own lesbianism, was never produced or published during her
lifetime. By contrast, another African-American playwright, Adrienne Kennedy
(1931–), has been enormously prolific and has seen her work produced by numerous
different companies in the United States and Europe. More than a dozen plays have
been published, together with several autobiographical works of nonfiction and a
novella. A number of pieces have been commissioned by drama companies, ranging
from the Juilliard School in New York to the Royal Court in London. She has even
worked with John Lennon on a dramatic version of his writing. “I see my writing as
a growth of images. I think all my plays come out of dreams I had two or three years
before,” Kennedy has said. Her dramatic style is in fact a vivid mix of expressionism,
surrealism, and African ritual. She uses nonlinear plots, dream imagery, split
characters who exist in trancelike states, and fragmented formats. Characters may be
played by more than one actor, one character may mutate into another, masks andGGray_c05.indd 664ray_c 05 .indd 664 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM