Lorraine Hansberry - Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?

Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published and produced in some thirty countries, while her film adaptation was nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death, her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In 1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les Blancs, her last playposthumously performed on Broadway and recently in prominent regional theatershas been hailed by a number of critics as her best.

Works byLorraine Hansberry

A Raisin in the Sun
The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window
The Drinking Gourd
The Movement
What Use Are Flowers?
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Les Blancs

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 1994

Copyright 1972 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executorof the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry
Introduction copyright 1994 by Margaret B. Wilkerson
Foreword copyright 1994 by Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff
Critical Backgrounds and Postscript Copyright 1972 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 by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1972.

CAUTION : Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, electronic, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved, permission for which must be secured in writing from the authors agent: the William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings.
The amateur acting rights of Les Blancs, are controlled exclusively by Samuel French, 25 West 45 Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10036. The amateur acting rights of The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? are controlled exclusively by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff, Executrix of the Estate of Robert Nemiroff.
The Drinking Gourd: Copyright 1969 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

Portions of Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? were first published in To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Copyright 1969 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

What Use Are Flowers? appeared in slightly different form in Works in ProgressCopyright 1969, 1972 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

Notes on Follow the Drinking Gourd and Steal Away from Songs of the Civil War by Irwin Silber. Copyright 1960 by Irwin Silber. Bonanza Books, a division of Crown Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Irwin Silber.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hansberry, Lorraine, 19301965.
Les Blancs: the collected last plays of Lorraine Hansberry.
CONTENTS : Les Blancs.The drinking gourd.What use are flowers?
I. Hansberry, Lorraine, 19301965. The drinking gourd, 1972. II. Hansberry, Lorraine, 19301965. What use are flowers? 1972. III. Title.
PS3515.A515B5 1972 812.54 69-16462
eISBN: 978-0-307-81556-9

v3.1

I N M EMORIAM
Robert Nemiroff (192991)

To Bobby with love
Mili and Leo with gratitude
Hattie Handy Manning for unswerving support

AND
NELSON MANDELA
with the fervent hope that the sun
rising over the new South Africa
will infuse the world with its glow

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough andI wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

If anything should happenbefore tis donemay I trust that all commas and periods will be placed and someone will complete my thoughts

This last should be the least difficult since there are so many who think as I do

L ORRAINE H ANSBERRY

The second excerpt of Lorraine Hansberrys above comes from an undated journal entry, presumably written near the end of the playwrights life. The first, however, was written not at the end, but at the beginning of her career. These thoughts were delivered on March 1, 1959, before an audience of her peers at a conference on The Negro Writer and His Roots.

Two weeks later, her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway. Two months following that date, she became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman,to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year.

Six years later, at age thirty-four, she was dead of cancer.

We are indebted to the late Robert Nemiroff, Hansberrys former husband and literary executor, to whom she entrusted all her works, as the person most singularly responsible for perpetuating her legacy. He was not alone: actors, directors, other stage professionals, journalists, critics, and, above all, audiences have kept the playwrights works alive. But Nemiroff spent the twenty-six years that he survived Hansberry meticulously placing the periods and commas necessary to provide the living evidence that the artist who died too soon was a major American writer.

My Foreword here is a tribute to them both. For if in her short life the prolific Hansberry created far more than her now-classic first work, A Raisin in the Sun, and her second, The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Windowwhich was playing on Broadway at the time of her deaththe very richness of her output deserved the commitment of one equally dedicated to effecting wide recognition of the extent and range of her legacy.