Today we are revisiting a groundbreaking play that premiered this week in 1959.
Younger Very few plays can lay claim to changing the general public's perception of what theatre can be, yet Lorraine Hansberry's legendary drama A RAISIN IN THE SUN did precisely that when it opened on the Great White Way back on March 11, 1959. Presenting the timely tale of a Chicago family facing a new era of civil rights while dealing with financial woes, housing issues and addiction while depicting the various interpersonal relationships of the central clan, Hansberry imbued the enterprise with poetry, heart, humor, import and timely relevance. To say that A RAISIN IN THE SUN changed the Broadway landscape in a remarkable way would be a vast understatement - indeed, the play is an elemental thread in the historical tapestry of Broadway for not only being one of the first African American-centric plays to receive nationwide acclaim and attention for its applicability to the time at which it premiered, but also for acting as a precurso to the masterpieces of subsequent great theatre artists with similarly important race-related themed in the following decades such as Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe, Susan Lori-Parks, Amiri Baraka and August Wilson.
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