Studied by 1 personCritic Yoman Saber
“Walter’s sense of manhood is continually threatened by his confinement in [his] social reality, yet he never loses his power of dreaming. [Critic] Bigsby argues that Walter’s dream is predominantly motivated by a sense of “indignity and self-hatred” and [states that] “far from rejecting the system which is oppressing him [he] wholeheartedly embraces it” (1967). [...] Walter does embrace a system that crushes him, but what other alternative does he have? It is either the American dream or ghetto-wretched hopelessness.”
Critic James Baldwin
“I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theatre. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theatre, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theatre because the theatre had always ignored them. But, in Raisin, black people recognised that house and all the people in it […] and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the house but by their knowledge of the streets.”
Critic Harold Bloom
“Alas, I regret to say that now in 2008 with Obama fighting a campaign for the American presidency, a breakthrough theatrical event of 1958-9 sadly qualifies as a period piece and not, I think, as a permanent work of American dramatic literature. [T]here are no realised personalities among the characters, no eloquence in the language, and only worn-out clichés in the dramatist’s stance and attitude, it becomes impossible to sustain a suspension of critical judgement.”
Lorraine Hansberry herself
Lorraine Hansberry says: “I happen to believe that the most ordinary human being . . . has within him elements of profundity, of profound anguish. You don’t have to go to the kings and queens of the earth—I think the Greeks and the Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept—but every human being is in enormous conflict about something, even if it’s how to get to work in the morning and all of that.”
19 January 1959 - Hansberry in a letter to her mother (to whom the play is dedicated): “Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people. Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are – and just as mixed up – but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks – people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say. I hope it will make you very proud.” – Lorraine Hansberry in Young, Gifted and Black (1969).
In an interview Hansberry says: Well I hadn’t noticed a contradiction because I’d always been under the impression that Negroes are people. […] However, […] I believe […] that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what is. In other words, I have told people that not only is this a Negro family, specifically and culturally, but it’s not even a New York family or a southern Negro family. It is specifically Southside Chicago[.] I think people, to the extent we accept them and believe them as who they’re supposed to be, to that extent they can become everybody.
Novella Nelson, actor who Played Lena in 2001 Young Vic production
Nelson, like Beneatha, was a politicised college student. She saw the original production of the play in 1959: “I identified with it on many, many levels. I was a first generation college student from my family and I was deeply involved in African American civil rights concepts. I had a brother like Walter Lee. And I had a mother and father who gave us the best, but gave us only what they knew. It made me cry. And it made me open my eyes to respect my family and see my own snobbishness” (Financial Times, 21 Feb 2005).
Sarah Hemming, journalist, on the 2001 production and David Lan, director
While the play vividly expresses a specific experience of the 1950s, it also raises lasting moral issues. Director David Lan says, “On one level, this play asks what it takes to become free. That’s a big issue for today. How do you find freedom? Is it through money? When people see the play, they aren’t having conversations just about what was happening in the fifties, they’re talking about the issues [such as whether the family should have accepted Lindner’s money]. You end up talking about why the family could not take his offer: about dignity, and who you represent, and what you give up in order to succeed, and what is success and what is progress”. – Financial Times 21 Feb 2005.
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