Aside from the recent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Robert O’Hara doesn’t usually direct revivals. Also, Shakespeare aside, public theaters don’t usually produce them.But on Tuesday the public opened up for O’Hara Lorraine Hansbury’s “Raisins in the Sun”: Not just a revival, but a further ‘exploration’ of an early production of the 1959 classic, as well-known today as it was groundbreaking when it debuted.
So how do you make it new? Apparently, evidence of this staging is that by ferociously emphasizing its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, it inverts standard procedures and produces results that are sometimes surprising and sometimes stunted.
Not that the play needed help to feel relevant. Like all great works, it has consistently proven to be timely. It reported racist backlash in telling the story of the Youngers, a black family looking to move from a “mousetrap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side into a home in a working-class white neighborhood. , is expected. It has taken a toll on American life since Reconstruction. And in dramatizing the impact of that backlash on Walter Lee, the family’s reckless dreamer, it offers a poignant psychological portrait of black masculinity in distress.
Hansbury, as was customary at the time, prioritizes estate planning and finally wraps Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister, and son) in hopeful arms. Starting with the ‘ghetto itus’ insult, 3 generations he only has 2 bedrooms and the bathroom is only shared with his neighbors down the hall. Even the feeble houseplants, symbolically undernourished in a lightless apartment, are promised new life.
From the beginning, O’Hara signals to reverse focus and widen focus to darken at the same time (and repeat all the way). His work, as written, is not from where Ruth Younger (Mandy Masden) is making breakfast, but rather from Walter Lee (Francois Baptiste) watching his sleeping son Travis from the dimly lit depths of his apartment. It starts with carrying it to the sofa bed in the living room. It’s a haunting image that hints at how his father’s hopes, and perhaps his failures, carry over into the future, as O’Hara’s future and landscape designer Clint Ramos literally translate in a devastating coup at the end. To do.
In the meantime, no matter how wisely Hansbury divides the play’s attention among its protagonists, including main character Lena (Tonya Pinkins) and daughter Venesa (Paige Gilbert), O’Hara has brought his prodigious theatrical imagination to Walter Lee. focus on
Baptiste, one of the most compelling stage actors today, has no trouble filling the additional space created by his interpretation, making the character more alarming than usual, but not so believable. there is no. Baptiste manages to pull him out of the play entirely, turning an already terrifying speech (“Oh, Yassu Boss! Yassu, Great White Father!”) into a minstrel brutal moment. I did. Peel the role.
However, some of O’Hara’s other attempts to push for Hansbury’s naturalism have been less successful. Reaching forward as well as backward along the line of family men, he spends part of the conversation normally assigned to Lena wandering in and out of the atmosphere in seemingly untethered actions. transferred to the ghost of his husband. (Spectral Her writing is by Alex Jainchill.) Also unanchored: Walter’s Leigh and Ruth Post-Couple Pillows passage of her talk. You can also hear their lovemaking moans.
Instead of creating an impression of the affection buried in their marriage, as it is clearly meant to do, interpolation pushes the affection behind the scenes. It’s been a problem all along. O’Hara directs most of the family scenes as free-for-all overlaps, creating a general impression of dysfunction and little attachment. (Most of the funny and acerbic detail is lost in the noise.) Sometimes O’Hara can’t stand Hansbury’s sometimes strenuous dramaturgy, turning all the dials—volume, contrast, tint—to the extreme right. I felt like I turned.
But that wasn’t the case with the earlier version of this revival seen at the 2019 Williamstown Theater Festival. Led more equally by Battiste’s Walter Lee and his S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lena, “Raisin” was just as bold, but less cartoonish. And while the current cast is very good overall, it’s worth noting that the comic material is handled most deftly.
Rather, the problem seems to be that O’Hara’s continued quest escapes Hansbury’s orbit, leaving some of the serious characters stuck in the thin air between her style and his. Like Lena, Pinkins is usually capable of astonishing depth and power, but is greatly hampered by too many directorial duties, including the sudden onset of violent paralysis that no one onstage notices. It is And where the script famously slapped her daughter for her profanity, O’Hara took her further and laid her Venesa flat on her floor.
Despite his similar approach to the play as a whole, it doesn’t last long. you can’t. Too much internal energy and direction for a single failure involving Hansberry to throw the whole thing off track. Venesa’s choice between his two suitors, a preppy conformist (Mr. Fitzgerald) and a Nigerian idealist (John Clay III), is utterly compelling no matter how awkward the setup is. . And the scene in which the Youngers’ new neighborhood representative (Jesse Pennington) “welcomes” them with a veiled menace almost resembles a mustachioed soap opera, but it’s still one of the highlights of American theater. He’s one.
In that sense, O’Hara, a mordant comics playwright himself, aside from the glorious direction of contemporary works such as “Slave Play” and “BLKS,” is rethinking expectations for the “Raisin” genre. You’re right. Not because they need it, but because they can handle it. And even if his pessimism about American racism somewhat contradicts Hansbury’s cautious optimism, he has more than 60 years of history to support his case. Just because the play is so prescient doesn’t mean its story is over. That means, sadly, never will.
raisins in the sun
Until November 20th at the Public Theater in Manhattan. publictheater.orgPerformance time: 3 hours.