An Exclusive Look Inside 'A Raisin in the Sun'
Tonya Pinkins wasn’t looking to do a revival.
“Robert O’Hara and I have been trying to work together for a lot of years,” the Tony Award-winning actress says. “And when I got this call to do A Raisin in the Sun, I was like, ‘No, thank you. I do new plays.’ Then Robert started telling me his vision for the play, and the question that he asked that intrigued me was, ‘Why is this played by a Black queer woman that has four Black women in it, known as a play about a Black man's dreams?’ He said, ‘I am not going to center the man in this play.’ I was like, ‘Oh, we're going to treat it like a new play? Okay, then let's do it.’”
The O’Hara-directed production of Raisin—playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s classic, which first premiered on Broadway in 1959—is opening October 19 at New York City’s Public Theater and will do just that. This production, the first photos of which are premiering here, stars Pinkins, Francois Battiste, Calvin Dutton, Paige Gilbert, and Mandi Masden, among others, and will run through November.
“I had already done the play twice, and so it had been a part of my artistic life for about a decade,” O’Hara explains. “When the Public asked if I would do a version with them, it was a joy to have the opportunity to revisit it. What drew me back to the play was that it is one of the most amazingly written and profound pieces of theater I've ever read or witnessed. It speaks to me on so many personal levels as a Black, queer person, as an American, and as a human being. It's so complicated and there is so much in there to get inside and interrogate.”
It's also a major part of what’s shaping up to be a big season for Hansberry. A February revival of the late playwright’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, will be staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; artist Alison Saar’s sculpture “To Sit A While,” depicting Hansberry surrounded by chairs in which viewers are invited to sit, is on a nationwide tour; and the writer even makes an appearance in another Public Theater production, played by Daphne Gaines in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge.
“I think of those things as kismet; artists dream for things like that to happen” Pinkins says. “She was 25 when this play was on Broadway, and she was gone at 34. This is only the fourth New York City production, and it's her Public Theater debut and the first off Broadway production of the play. There are a number of scenes that are in the script that have never been done in any of the Broadway productions, and an entire female character has [previously been] cut out, so you will be seeing her brilliantly played by Perri Gaffney in this production. I think that Lorraine is probably smiling down from heaven and going, ‘Finally, we're going to see the play that I wrote.’”
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