Deferred Dreams Still Resonate in ‘Raisin’ Revival

This game-changing drama by Lorraine Hansberry quickly dispels any notion of folksy, “Our Town”-ish universality, however, as it quickly veers toward far more specific social commentary. In the Crossroads Theater’s lovely new production, fiercely directed by Eric Ruffin, the play seems as fresh, strong, textured, unrelenting and Chekhovian as it must have been when it opened on Broadway in 1959, with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee playing Walter Lee and Ruth Younger, a husband and wife living in an apartment on Chicago’s South Side with his mother, his sister and their son.

It is a pleasant, modest apartment in this production, thanks to Jeremy Doucette’s apt scenic design. But Travis (Gregory Barnes), the youngest member of the family, has to sleep on the living room sofa. Lena (Petronia Paley), his widowed grandmother, would love for them all to live in a house with a backyard, and the $10,000 check from her husband’s life insurance, due in the mail any day now, will make that a possibility.

The play is set in the early 1950s, so that $10,000 is a lot of money. But Lena’s son, Walter Lee (Jimonn Cole), who works as a driver for a white man, wants to use it to invest in a liquor store with two of his buddies. And the money is also needed for the education of Walter Lee’s sister, Beneatha (Vichelle Jones), who plans to become a doctor.

Beneatha, a college student, feels like a particularly contemporary character, and not only because of her career choice, still an untraditional one for a woman in the mid-20th century.

Beneatha is also an outspoken atheist (“All the tyranny in the world will never put a god in the heavens,” she tells her sister-in-law), which shocks her mother. Beneatha condemns African-Americans’ assimilation into a predominantly white culture, and is soon parading around the apartment in an African dress and head wrap (gifts from a Nigerian-born boyfriend), with her hair cut short in a proto-Afro.

The only jarring note, reminding us of the play’s age, is the appearance of a particular male attitude toward women’s place in society. “Go be a nurse like other women,” Walter Lee tells Beneatha. “Or just get married and shut up.” He has just finished telling his wife, Ruth (Chantal Jean-Pierre), that women should “build their men up” and complaining that she doesn’t do that for him.

Ruth has problems of her own, including a suspicion that she is pregnant with a child that she and Walter Lee cannot afford. (The word “abortion” is never spoken, but Ruth investigates one as an option.) Their marriage is not in good shape, and Lena has to remind her son that it’s dangerous “when a man goes outside his house for peace.”

There is not a single weak performance among this strong, personable cast. Even the tiniest roles — like Bobo (Bjorn DuPaty), who brings Walter Lee some devastating news, and Karl Lindner (Andy Prosky), the white man who represents the kind of welcome the Youngers can expect in their new neighborhood — are played with conviction and urgency.

“A Raisin in the Sun,” which has never been produced at Crossroads before (the musical version, “Raisin,” was performed in 1982), qualifies as a tragedy: big dreams are trampled because of one man’s misjudgment. And yet hope remains. Progress is made. Life goes on.

The play’s influence goes on as well. Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park,” which looks at the house and the neighborhood that the Younger family dream of inhabiting, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday.