YESTERDAYS and A RAISIN IN THE SUN Set for Crossroads Theatre Company Season

The Crossroads Theatre Company's current season will continue with Reenie Upchurch's YESTERDAYS: AN EVENING WITH Billie Holiday will play from February 17th - February 27.

Set in May 1959 in a small New York nightclub, Yesterdays is a fictional dramatization with music depicting Billie Holiday's last performance as envisioned by playwright Reenie Upchurch who had seen the jazz singer perform near the end of her tumultuous career. Played by jazz vocalist Vanessa Rubin, the on-stage Billie Holiday intersperses songs with stories of her troubled life along with historical moments from the 1930's and 1940's jazz scene, including Bessie Smith and Artie Shaw.

Wrapping up the season is Lorraine Hansberry's classic A RAISIN IN THE SUN from April 14-May 1.

When playwright Lorraine Hansberry died at the age of thirty-four in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned these words:

Ms. Hansberry's commitment of spirit, her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.

These sentiments resonated with Marshall Jones III, Crossroads Producing Artistic Director: "This now fifty-year-old dramatic classic is being performed on the Crossroads' stage for the first time. But as a saga of a family striving to achieve the American dream, A Raisin in the Sun spans generational gaps. Whether experiencing it today for the first time--or after a lapse of several years--the play brings a new sense of discovery and vision in our shared journey as Americans."

A Raisin in the Sun takes place in the 1950's Chicago apartment of the Younger family as each member struggles with their vision of a better life and the use of the life insurance check from Walter Younger, Sr. The lines from Langston Hughes poem Harlem that give the play its title still seem to sum up the play's essence:

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