The Denver Center Theatre Company is doing a excellent production of Lorraine Hansberry's  A Raisin in the Sun, the classic and moving exploration of individual expressions of the American dream on Chicago’s Southside. The title comes from these lines in the Langston Hughes poem Dream Deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

The play was inspired partly by the Hansberry's family struggle to move into the White Washington Park neighborhood in South Chicago, a fight that was finally settled in her fathers favor by the U.S. Supreme Court (Hansberry vs Lee 1940).

In the play, father’s $10,000 life insurance settlement inspires three generations of the inner-city Younger family to dream of very different ways to spend the money. Mama dreams of living in a better neighborhood, her daughter plans to go to medical school and her son intends to buy into a liquor store. Money creates powerful family dynamics, and the actors do a phenomenal job of capturing the emotions of the mother, who suddenly becomes the head of the family with her dream within her grasp with the arrival of the insurance check, and her children, who fight for their dreams.

Raisin in the Sun came to Broadway in 1959, during a time my mom and dad were making business trips to New York and seeing plays there. I wonder if they took this one in.


Mike Hartman's excellent performance hit closest to home for me. Mike plays the representative from the white neighborhood who comes to ask the black family not to move in, at the same time explaining that the neighborhood is very friendly and unprejudiced, of course. It reminds me of conversations with my family when I hired the first black route salesman for my father's company.

There was an excellent review in the Denver Post yesterday:
http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_13527816