A RAISIN IN THE SUN

This year the Great Lakes Theater Festival revives Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 stage hit, which, like many great works that are now assigned reading in countless schools, run the danger of being taken for granted – especially by modern audiences of the cinema's “African-American Renaissance” spearheaded by the likes of Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Julie Dash. But the classic 1961 movie adaptation (preserving most of the epochal Broadway cast) finds Hansberry's searing dialogue still shouting trumpet-loud to the hearts and souls of black fold, or people of any color who reach for a piece of the proverbial pie. The Younger family – discontented apartment-dwellers on the south side of Chicago – are virtually handed their slice after a patriarch's death brings them an insurance payoff. Each Younger has a dream; each dream costs; each dream has a catch. Fiery son Walter Lee wants out of his chauffeur job and into management of his own liquor store. Cynical daughter Ruth (Cleveland's Ruby Dee) wants an expensive medical degree and mother Lena wants a house in an upscale white neighborhood. “Ghetto-itis,” “the Man,” the ugly paradox of black misogyny, even a semi-skeptical appraisal of Afro-centricism – A RAISIN IN THE SUN laid it all on the line well before Shaft and Original Gangstas.