Craig Schwartz
Jonas Schwartz - TheaterMania
Progress treads so slowly it almost feels backwards. Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun premiered almost six decades ago, but American culture still grapples heavily with racism and other prejudices. The Younger family of the play grabs at the American dream, but society keeps moving the brass ring just out of reach.
Read more…
Now running through April 8
Photo by John Perrin Flynn
Terry Morgan - Stage Raw
It’s kind of amazing that a major play by Lorraine Hansberry is just having its Los Angeles premiere now. Perhaps the tide of criticism that caused the play to close after one month on Broadway in 1970 tainted its reputation in some way, or its need for a 24-member cast scared producers off. Thankfully, Rogue Machine decided to rectify this situation, and its current production is a smart, exciting theatrical event. Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Lorraine Hansberry was the first black woman to write a play that was produced on Broadway when her classic A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959. At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award becoming the youngest playwright to do so. Read more…
Deborah Klugman – LA Weekly
Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs is set in colonial Africa sometime in the mid–20th century, and while much has changed since then, the play’s moral dilemmas and the racism and hypocrisy that give rise to them remain with us. Read more…
Margaret Gray – LA Times
The playwright Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer in 1965 when she was only 34, leaving behind incomplete drafts of “Les Blancs” (“The Whites”), a play she had begun writing in 1960, soon after “A Raisin in the Sun” made her famous.Read more…
Now running through July 3
Photo by Ed Krieger
Neal Weaver – Stage Raw
Lorraine Hansberry is securely enshrined as an important black playwright, but what few people remember nowadays is that she was also a lovely young woman, with gamin charm and an impish sense of humor. Read more…
Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze
“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked Langston Hughes in his 1951 poem “Harlem.” “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
Too many deferred dreams have been keeping the Younger family tamped down, in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 classic “A Raisin in the Sun,” getting a thoughtful revival at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre. Read more…
Now running through September 17