A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Background Notes

Lorraine Hansberry believed in human beings and their ability to "impose the reason for life on life." She was a social activist who fought injustice and raised her voice on behalf of those who couldn't or wouldn't speak. She thought deeply and wrote cogently about our responsibilities in society in her more well-known dramatic writings, but also in essays, articles, and speeches. In her time absurdist theatre was enjoying a heyday: playwrights were probing existential questions in plays like Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Ms. Hansberry respected these concerns but she felt what was then called "the social question" should command the living. How, she asks in her work, do we treat each other in our everyday lives? How does the idea of equality for all actually function in families and in society?    

Five members, and three generations, of the Younger family live in a small apartment on the south side of Chicago. They're spirited, opinionated, willful and on top of each other. The patriarch, Walter, has died and the family anxiously awaits an insurance cheque for ten thousand dollars that they believe will change their situation. The problem is they all want the change to take a different form. Lena, Walter's widow, wants to use the money to buy a house, where the family will have space to move around and a yard to plant things. Her daughter Beneatha, curious, passionate and politically engaged, wants to finance her dream of going to medical school. Like her creator, Beneatha longs to explode stereotypes and defy limitations imposed on her by people who don't know her and don't care to know her. Walter Lee, Lena's son, is convinced that the best use of the money is investing in a liquor store. He's tired of living in these cramped quarters, tired of working all day every day so somebody else can benefit, tired of taking what he's given. Walter Lee dreams of making something great. 

Who is right? Or perhaps the question is: who is the most right? How can all these dreams be taken into account fairly when to split the money would mean nobody's dream can happen? Who has the right to decide? As the play progresses, these questions make it harder and harder for family members to treat each other kindly, harder and harder for them to see each other's point of view. In one scene Walter Lee, unwilling to listen to anybody else, and frustrated that even his wife Ruth won't listen to him, lashes out: "A man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs."

But Hansberry doesn't forget the larger society the Youngers live in and of course they're fighting more than each other. When Lena decides to buy a house in an all-white neighbourhood, the family encounters the polite, stiff-necked racism that wrote restrictive covenants in Chicago to make sure families like the Hansberrys were kept out of "nice" neighbourhoods like Woodlawn. The Hansberrys, like the Youngers, did move into the neighbourhood and they ran smack into the bone-deep racism the politeness didn't really cover. Hansberry doesn't take us that far in her play. Raisin ends on a note of hope, with the family deciding to move into the new house and start fresh. We don't know what will happen when they get there but what has happened has tested and strengthened this family. 

The power of Hansberry's writing is that the audience can connect strongly to all the characters so that even when they behave badly, selfishly, even when they react in anger, we understand what drives them. And if we are ever tempted to judge, Hansberry's humanism is there to temper us. As Lena says to Ruth: "There is always something left to love ... Child, when do you think it is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody?  Well then, you ain't through learnin' ..."

Soulpepper Associate Artist Paula Wing sits down with inaugural Soulpepper Academy graduate and director of A Raisin in the Sun, Weyni Mengesha. 

“This is a new experience for me”, Weyni Mengesha says over soup and a sandwich during a recent rehearsal day.  “I'm eating and sleeping.  I never used to be able to have my life when I was directing.  I'd lie awake, going over everything, questioning my choices.  It wasn't that I questioned myself so much in rehearsal.  Once I get there I'm drawn into the work and I go by instinct, I know what I want.  But the minute I was away, I'd start to doubt myself.” 

This newfound balance isn't the only thing that's different about this rehearsal process for the director.  Raisin marks the first time she's directed an existing script.  In fact, she accepted a place in the inaugural Soulpepper Academy specifically because she wanted to work with settled texts.  I'm surprised, and I ask about one of her biggest hits: Trey Anthony's 'da kink in my hair, which had a fantastically successful run at the Princess of Wales Theatre in 2005 and spawned the hit television series.  “It wasn't a play to begin with,” she smiles.  “It was a series of monologues.  I worked dramaturgically with Trey first, and then we talked about where all these monologues could happen.  On a bus?  In a salon?  We liked the idea of a salon and she went away and wrote a monologue for Novelette.  So it developed that way.” 

The same collaborative, intuitive process applies to her work with former Soulpepper Academy artist d.bi.young.anitafrica on her one-woman show Blood Claat.  In that case they had an idea and they explored it together though improvisations which they taped and transcribed, painstakingly building the show together.  And ironically in the Academy, Mengesha's only solo directing credit was the collectively created Blink, a hit at last year's Luminato Festival. 

When I ask how she came to choose Raisin she says she and Albert were talking about plays that could reflect a broader audience, and he suddenly mentioned Hansberry's classic.  Mengesha's response?  “Absolutely”, she nods.  “Absolutely.”  Serendipitously, at the same time across the country, Dennis Garnhum at Theatre Calgary was considering programming Raisin and a co-production was born. 

But casting Raisin was an intense process.  This is a greatly loved play and the desire to be involved with the production on the part of the community was strong.  Mengesha chose the cast with great care, staying true to her vision of the characters – even down to Kofi Payton, the young man playing ten-year-old Travis.  “I saw a lot of young people,” she says.  “But I was looking for a very particular thing and when Kofi came in on the last day, I saw Travis.  He's very special.  A natural.”  I met the lively Payton, who informed me proudly that he knew every single one of his lines.  Even in a brief encounter I could see why Mengesha chose him: his blithe, sweet confidence made me want to see him on stage. 

Nobody could accuse Weyni Mengesha of coming to her first text unprepared.  For months her room was plastered with pictures of Lorraine Hansberry.  She read everything she could get her hands on, including all Hansberry's works in print, and her biography.  “I was a bit obsessed,” she laughs.  In her short life Ms. Hansberry packed in a lot of living: artistic passion, intellectual exploration, and political engagement.  Hansberry stayed very involved with her community, as Weyni Mengesha herself does.  While her career has taken her as far away as London England, Mengesha's roots – and her theatrical practice – are grounded in, and nourished by, her work in the community both with young people and adults.   

She makes a strong case for producing Raisin in Canada.  “It makes more sense at this time than staging it even in New York because right now our community is living what the Youngers are living in the play”, she says, referring to the generational conflicts between Lena, who reflects the older, more Southern values of hard work and caution, and her son Walter Lee, who wants to take a big risk and get some of the wealth and prosperity he sees all around him in Chicago.  On any Toronto street you can meet people from all over the world.  Families come here every day hoping to make new lives, with the parents often making huge sacrifices for their children's future, only to find those same children taking on the prevailing Canadian culture, seeming, sometimes, to reject the parental values and hard work that gave them their opportunities.   

Mengesha chose not to theatricalize Raisin nor to over-emphasize the period in which it's set (1959).  In rehearsal she and the actors are exploring, as fully and as truthfully as they can, the family relationships which are the soul of the play.  To that end she has restored two scenes that are often left out: one with Lena and a neighbour, and the other a tender encounter between Walter Lee and his young son, Travis.  She feels very strongly about the latter, because it shows Walter Lee as an engaged, loving father, a positive image not often reflected in the mainstream media's depiction of Black men. 

After a brief lunch break, Weyni Mengesha, well rested and well nourished, returns to rehearsal.    I only hope this is the first of many Soulpepper productions for this warm, intelligent and passionate artist.