By Akeem Davis
Have you ever been to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.? It’s a breathtaking, exhaustive place—filled to the brim with history and teeming with information. In the time leading up to rehearsals for A Raisin in the Sun at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival this summer, I’ve often thought about my visits to this Smithsonian institution. Partly, it’s because the African American Smithsonian tells the unvarnished truth—as all museums should—but also because it clarifies the significant distinction between a fossil and an artifact.
This will mark my eighth summer in the Lehigh Valley, so I know that a renowned Shakespeare fest like ours is precisely where leadership, artists and patrons unite in their shared aversion to fossilized productions—those that are dusty, sleepy, tired, and obsolete. Our Festival is only interested in rendering work that is rich, and useful, and ringing loud with the exhibited significance of an artifact. For us, A Raisin in the Sun must be a reckoning, a re-evaluation, a fresh realization. That is my aim, and I’m grateful to the Festival for the opportunity to achieve that goal.
A Raisin in the Sun was the very first film my father and I discussed. I still remember the exchange—having taken Walter Lee’s side in the debate—I expressed disbelief at Beneatha’s tantrum when she learned that Mama had given Walter the money. My father, a man so complex I will always be getting to know him, said softly, “That was for Beneatha’s education, and Mama had no right to give that away.” He repeated, “Mama had no right…” just like that. It is still a tender moment for me, for I looked over at my father, and understood him anew. I saw him as a child, vulnerable to a parent’s decisions; as a sibling, deserving of an inheritance; as a father, with the weight of his legacy (to me!) on his shoulders. If my childhood powers of observation sound precocious, then I’ll stand guilty as charged. But it’s the truth.
Since then, A Raisin in the Sun has been perhaps the most significant piece of American drama in my life. The prompt it evaluates, taken from Langston Hughes’ efficient poem about the inevitable implosion of the Black American dream-turned-nightmare through evils like Jim Crow, segregation, and outright violent discrimination, is so eloquently on display in the dynamic of the Younger family. THIS is why the play has always mattered to me: because we’re all family. Of course we aren’t all kin, but we’re all family. And if we’re all to experience the inheritance of the American Dream, it will require a consensus that it belongs to all of us. It’ll require a consensus between Mama and Walter Lee, between Walter Lee and Beneatha, but also between you and me.
I was six years old or so when I was first introduced to A Raisin in the Sun, so as I’ve grown and matured, Hansberry’s play has delivered abundantly and appreciated in value. It offers classic roles that only grow richer over time, with triumphant performances by icons of the stage and screen, and all while stoking maybe the most important conversation of our country’s existence: Who gets access to The Dream?
A Raisin in the Sun, even now nearly 70 years later, is a treatise on the devastating value of liberty in a person’s navigation of the world. The play is a profound consideration of the zero-sum game of capitalism, where money sets price but doesn’t necessarily speak to value. Or worth. Only Mama seems to hold on to the very real exchange between the insurance money and the life of her husband, Big Walter.
Speaking of fathers… It has been a revelatory journey holding A Raisin in the Sun in relief of Hamlet and vice-versa. Hamlet, the greatest play of all time, underscores the grief inherent to the structure of the plot in A Raisin in the Sun. Both plays are situated in worlds still reeling from the death of a patriarch, leaving their characters all with new understandings of their place and purpose in the world.
On the other hand, A Raisin in the Sun—perhaps the greatest American play of all time—has illuminated a new source for Hamlet’s lunacy. When examined under the conditions of Hughes’ poem, Hamlet’s stages of madness are all made richer when viewed as the result of a grand, all-encompassing, bitter disappointment—Hamlet’s own dream deferred. These plays are having an incredible dialogue that I had never tapped into before. Thanks, PSF!
I feel fortunate for the opportunity to direct this play with such a gifted, relentless and creative cadre of artists. I’m indebted to each and every member of PSF’s staff for their relentless support this summer, in summers past, and in summers to come! It will be a high privilege to welcome audiences to our work this summer.