Lorraine Hansberry - A Raisin in the Sun

Works by
LORRAINE HANSBERRY

A Raisin in the Sun

The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window

The Drinking Gourd

To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Les Blancs

What Use Are Flowers?

The Movement

FIRST VINTAGE BOOK EDITION, DECEMBER 1994

Copyright 1958, 1986 by Robert Nemiroff, as an unpublished work
Copyright 1959, 1966, 1984, 1987, 1988 by Robert Nemiroff
Introduction copyright 1987, 1988 by Robert Nemiroff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in somewhat different form by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1958.

Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that A Raisin in the Sun, being fully protected under the copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Universal Copyright and Berne Conventions, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings, permission for which must be secured in writing. All inquiries should be addressed to the William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, authorized agents for the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry and for Robert Nemiroff, Executor.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for permission to reprint eleven lines from Dream Deferred (Harlem) from The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1951 by Langston Hughes.
Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hansberry, Lorraine, 19301965.
A raisin in the sun / by Lorraine Hansberry; with an introduction
by Robert Nemiroff.1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80744-1
1. Afro-AmericansHistory20th centuryDrama. I. Title.
PS3515.A515R3 1994
812.54dc20 94-20636

v3.1

To Mama:
in gratitude for the dream

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat

Or crust and sugar over

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

LANGSTON HUGHES

This is the most complete edition of A Raisin in the Sun ever published. Like the American Playhouse production for television, it restores to the play two scenes unknown to the general public, and a number of other key scenes and passages staged for the first time in twenty-fifth anniversary revivals and, most notably, the Roundabout Theatres Kennedy Center production on which the television picture is based.

The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic; one of a handful of great American dramas A Raisin in the Sun belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Days Journey into Night, and The Glass Menagerie. So wrote The New York Times and the Washington Post respectively of Harold Scotts revelatory stagings for the Roundabout in which most of these elements, cut on Broadway, were restored. The unprecedented resurgence of the work (a dozen regional revivals at this writing, new publications and productions abroad, and now the television production that will be seen by millions) prompts the new edition.

Produced in 1959, the play presaged the revolution in black and womens consciousnessand the revolutionary ferment in Africathat exploded in the years following the playwrights death in 1965 to ineradicably alter the social fabric and consciousness of the nation and the world. As so many have commented lately, it did so in a manner and to an extent that few could have foreseen, for not only the restored material, but much else that passed unnoticed in the play at the time, speaks to issues that are now inescapable: value systems of the black family; concepts of African American beauty and identity; class and generational conflicts; the relationships of husbands and wives, black men and women; the outspoken (if then yet unnamed) feminism of the daughter; and, in the penultimate scene between Beneatha and Asagai, the larger statement of the playand the ongoing struggle it portends.

Not one of the cuts, it should be emphasized, was made to dilute or censor the play or to soften its statement, for everyone in that herculean, now-legendary band that brought Raisin to Broadwayand most specifically the producer, Philip Rose, and director, Lloyd Richardsbelieved in the importance of that statement with a degree of commitment that would have countenanced nothing of the kind. How and why, then, did the cuts come about?

The scene in which Beneatha unveils her natural haircut is an interesting example. In 1959, when the play was presented, the rich variety of Afro styles introduced in the mid-sixties had not yet arrived: the very few black women who wore their hair unstraightened cut it very short. When the hair of Diana Sands (who created the role) was cropped in this fashion, however, a few days before the opening, it was not contoured to suit her: her particular facial structure required a fuller Afro, of the sort she in fact adopted in later years. Result? Rather than vitiate the playwrights pointthe beauty of black hairthe scene was dropped.

Some cuts were similarly the result of happenstance or unpredictables of the kind that occur in any production: difficulties with a scene, the processes of actors, the dynamics of staging, etc. But most were related to the length of the play: running time. Time in the context of bringing to Broadway the first play by a black (young and unknown) woman, to be directed, moreover, by another unknown black first, in a theater were black audiences virtually did not existand where, in the entire history of the American stage, there had never been a serious commercially successful black drama!

So unlikely did the prospects seem in that day, in fact, to all but Phil Rose and the company, that much as some expressed admiration for the play, Roses eighteen-month effort to find a co-producer to help complete the financing was turned down by virtually every established name in the business. He was joined at the last by another newcomer, David Cogan, but even with the money in hand, not a single theater owner on the Great White Way would rent to the new production! So that when the play left New York for tryoutswith a six-hundred-dollar advance in New Haven and no theater to come back tohad the script and performance been any less ready, and the response of critics and audiences any less unreserved than they proved to be, A Raisin in the Sun would never have reached Broadway.

Under these circumstances the pressures were enormous (if unspoken and rarely even acknowledged in the excitement of the work) not