![]() ![]() When Lena's late husband's insurance check arrives, Lena hopes to use it to buy a house in a white neighborhood. ![]() ![]() The title of the play was borrowed from Langston Hughes’s poem, “ Harlem,”: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” The play likewise tells a story of a “dream deferred:” It follows Walter Younger and his mother, Lena, who both yearn to move their family out of Chicago's South Side neighborhood in search of better lives. The 530-performance run of A Raisin in the Sun not only marked a milestone in the history of American theater, it became a pivotal moment in American cultural history that opened doors for Black artists, actors, writers, and filmmakers, including Gordon Parks. It was also the first directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards, and the first commercially produced drama about Black life featured on Broadway. A story about a Black working-class family living in Chicago, the play was the first on Broadway to be written and produced by an African American woman. On MaLorraine Hansberry made history on Broadway with the opening of her play, A Raisin in the Sun. James Baldwin, writing about A Raisin in the Sun in his introduction to Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 1969 Black people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.” “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. ![]()
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