Power drama of family dreams

A RAISIN IN THE SUN, Royal Exchange, Manchester

IN case you are wondering, the title of Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama of family life comes from a poem and is about the drying up, or not, of unfulfilled dreams.

Written in the late Fifties (six years before her death at 34 from cancer), Raisin was a huge popular and critical hit, the first play by a black woman ever produced on Broadway.

The play concerns America’s first, small steps on the road to desegregation — a hot topic among the American public. Importantly, it told its story from one family’s experience, not that of an entire political cause.

With it, Hansberry gave black America its own Williams or O’Neill: someone who spoke to black audiences in the way those two greats spoke to white theatregoers. It was the perfect combination of a play and a playwright whose time had come.

Which is probably why the work — about a struggling black family, matriarch Lena, son, daughter-in-law and grandson, Walter, Ruth and Travis, and daughter Beneatha — is rarely performed today: it’s time has gone.

Well no; in fact the intervening decades have turned Hansberry’s masterpiece from political drama to dramatic timelessness.

As Walter (Ray Fearon) tries and fails to do better for his family, as Beneatha (Tracy Ifeachor) hopes to be a doctor, as Ruth (Jenny Jules) just wants a better life and as Lena (Starletta DuPois) wants to use her insurance cheque to give them all somewhere better to live, the ebb and flow of family emotions are reminiscent of Miller.

A small family comes to represent universal hope, honour and a search for something better; its failures more significant than its successes and the breaking of its dreams cause to try again.

Michael Buffong’s terrific production, set in a single room in a Chicago apartment that has seen better days, is an exemplary orchestration of the flow of family life, with laughter, anger, tears, sadness and pride, assisted by the uniformly highly-believable cast headed by Starletta DuPois, one of those wonderful matrons anyone would be proud to call mother.

As Walter, Ray Fearon runs the whole range from bitterness to amorousness to anger and back, driving the family members to similar, highly charged emotions — when they aren’t just being a fairly ordinary, aspirational, American family.