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Film Lets 'Sun' Shine On New Eyes

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By FELICIA R. LEE, The New York Times

Published: February 21, 2008

In the shabby living room of a Chicago apartment, a frustrated young chauffeur dreams of owning a business and buying pearls for his wife. His fiery sister, a college student, dreams of becoming a doctor. His weary mother dreams of a nice home for them all, and his pregnant wife dreams of just holding on until their poverty eases.

That's the family Lorraine Hansberry gave the world when "A Raisin in the Sun" made its Broadway debut in 1959.

Since then, reincarnations have included a 1961 film with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, a 1989 made-for-TV movie staring Danny Glover and Esther Rolle and a highly praised 2004 Broadway production featuring Sean Combs, Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Sanaa Lathan.

Now that classic play about the struggles of the Younger family will become a three-hour film special on ABC (8 p.m. Monday).

A New Audience Awaits

The film features the 2004 Broadway cast, and its producers are hoping a new generation of viewers will find relevance in Hansberry's story, which revolves around dissension in a poor, black family over what to do with the deceased father's $10,000 life insurance policy. The reach of broadcast TV has the potential to bring fresh eyes to the story.

"This play is saying what all the politicians are saying in this election year: It's time for a change, and it's time for a dream," said Kenny Leon, who directed the play on Broadway and the ABC special. "If you look at what's missing in our society - the strength of families, the idea that dreams come true - not so much has changed since 1959."

In an era when most schools, jobs and neighborhoods were racially segregated and Southern blacks faced high barriers to voting, Hansberry's play was hailed as groundbreaking. The language was searing and poetic, and the black characters were written with complex and evocative interior lives.

Through the character Beneatha, who dates an African man and hopes to live in Africa someday, "A Raisin in the Sun" anticipated the black enchantment with things African. Through the relationships between Lena and her children and son Walter Lee's quest for manhood, it telegraphed the seismic shift in gender relations and generation gap.

The well-received 2004 revival registered one of the highest box-office draws for a nonmusical on Broadway, and both Rashad and McDonald won Tony Awards.

Many young theatergoers were no doubt enticed by the opportunity to see music mogul Combs in the role of Walter Lee. Combs said he believed the new film would find a more receptive audience than ever before as the nation becomes less racially polarized.

"Everything that's said, everything that's going on in this film, every color, every nationality can relate to the struggle of wanting to be somebody, wanting to have better for their family and feeling like the dreams are slipping away," Combs said.

Lathan, who plays Beneatha, said she viewed her character as a stand-in for Hansberry. The playwright's own middle-class family desegregated a white neighborhood in Chicago, and she, too, chafed at the restrictions placed on women.

"Lorraine was ahead of her time; Beneatha was ahead of her time," Lathan said. "But the meaning of the word 'classic' is that it transcends generations and time and has a profound truth to different people at different times."

Rashad, who plays Lena Younger, said she saw the tale as multilayered, telling the love stories of three couples as two generations fight about the meaning of money and success.

Escape To New Problems

Lena, a housekeeper and babysitter for a white family, was part of the migration of blacks to Northern cities, where they sought to escape the brutal realities of the South.

That migration brought new problems. Lena misses her husband, who died after a hard life as a laborer. Her sense of loss is more acute when her son, Walter Lee, tells her that world is divided between the haves and have-nots and that "money is life."

"If you really look at that statement,
money is life,' it applies to people all over the world," Rashad said. When people think life is money, they begin to lose their freedom, no matter who or where they are."

In one scene, Walter Lee informs his family that he will tell a representative from the "home improvement" association (John Stamos) that the family will take his money in exchange for not moving into the all-white neighborhood, where his mother had just bought a house.

Lena is outraged by that decision.

"I come from five generations of slaves and sharecroppers, and ain't nobody, nobody in my family ever let somebody pay 'em no money as a way of telling us that we wasn't fit to walk the Earth," she tells Walter Lee. "We ain't never been that poor or dead inside."

Paris Qualles, who adapted the play for the movie, said scenes like that will rivet new audiences.

"America is still, by and large, in denial about its racist past and the tentacles that continue forward until today," he said. "That's why it's relevant."

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