[On April 6th,
1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were
given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and
moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a
crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]
On
Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving young married couple.
Walter and Ruth Younger, the
young husband and wife at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are
perhaps the least sympathetic of the Youngers, the drama’s major characters. To
be sure, as in the case in any great dramatic work, all the characters have
their flaws: but while the overly proud, widowed Mama (Lena) is also
struggling to keep her family together; self-centered elitist Beneatha is
impressively going to school to become a doctor; and naïve young Travis is just
trying to grow up; Travis’s parents Walter and Ruth are defined mostly by their
hot-and-cold marriage and Walter’s foolish and destructive get-rich-quick
schemes. Some combination of those factors, Walter’s individual pipe dreams and
the extremities to which their marital problems drive them both, could be said
to lead to most of the family’s worst arguments and problems throughout the
play.
That could
be said, but it’d be wrong, as the play’s final scenes reveal a much more
systematic and significant culprit, putting the Youngers in the center of a
broad and crucial biographical and
historical context: the racial “covenants” that made
it so difficult for African American and other minority families to move out of
cities like Chicago and into suburban neighborhoods in the decades after World
War II. While not as regimented or all-encompassing as the South’s system of
Jim Crow segregation, the
covenants did an equally thorough job of segregating their respective urban and
suburban worlds, and proved a powerfully difficult impediment to the dreams of
families like the Youngers. Systems like the covenants don’t explain away all
of Walter’s irresponsibilities or Ruth’s enabling—again, no dramatic work as
impressive as Hansberry’s treats its characters as mere ciphers—but they
certainly better reveal the world in which these characters are trying to
survive and succeed, and to an open-minded audience render Walter and Ruth
significantly more sympathetic as a result.
But in the
final scene Hansberry takes the couple, and her play, one step further still.
The Youngers have been approached by a representative from the neighborhood
association of the suburban community into which they hope to move, a man who
is offering them money in exchange for their withdrawing their purchase of that
suburban home. In one of the play’s most traditional moments, not only in terms
of gender roles but also because it embodies the spirit of Walter Sr., the
family’s departed father, both Mama and Ruth allow Walter to make the decision;
and Walter rises to the occasion, saying no to the lure of easy money and
rejecting the offer. He gains a great deal of respect from Mama in the process,
but perhaps even more significant is Ruth’s response: she seems to see in her
husband for the first time in years the man she married, a man who can model
for Travis a strong, proud, resilient African American identity and manhood in
the face of some of the worst their society can throw at them. The moment and
scene are tremendously moving for many reasons, but certainly at the top of the
list is seeing the reconnection between this flawed and troubled but likewise
resilient and impressive couple.
The drama concludes
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?
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