A Raisin in the Sun at the Oxford Playhouse
Just before the start of the new academic year, the Rent Cultures Network secured tickets for a visit to the Oxford Playhouse, where we saw Headlong’s brilliant new production of A Raisin in the Sun—the classic 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry, directed, here, by Tinuke Craig. The first play by an African American woman on Broadway, A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of the Younger family, who rent an apartment on the South Side of Chicago. We follow the Youngers as Lena—the head of the family—decides to put money towards a down payment. The Youngers’ new house will be in a white neighbourhood: Clybourne Park.
Our group included new Masters students, doctoral candidates, and lecturers, all from a range of disciplines—we brought our distinct experiences, interests, and areas of expertise to bear upon our discussion of the play. We stayed at the theatre for a conversation about the many ways in which it spoke to the themes of our network. A Raisin in the Sun is about housing injustice. At the same time, we thought the characters’ day-to-day experiences in rented housing also were a symptom of something deeper, or less concrete: racism, patriarchy, and class and generational conflict. The play connected the dots. The characters’ perspectives on property ownership brought us back to some of the ideas we discussed at our first workshop. So much of the play was about dreaming—as one member of our group put it, ‘inhabiting the now, but not settling in the now’. Hansberry seemed to be asking how the American Dream was experienced by Black citizens. Property ownership represented a kind of progress, a footprint, and was worth fighting and sacrificing for: we were struck by not only the play’s happy ending, but also the fact that we, the audience, never saw the new house in Clybourne Park. Hansberry left the Youngers’ shift to ownership to the imagination. Exchanging rental payments for a mortgage wasn’t necessarily going to be uncomplicated, we thought, given the ways in which both systems were fixed against African Americans. While the play tackles redlining in Chicago, we also considered the higher rental charges imposed on Black farmers and, much more recently, the repossession of houses during the 2007/8 crash.
In some cases, rent may be associated with a reluctant mobility; in others, it’s the very thing that blocks people from doing what they want to do. It seemed to us that Hansberry was testing the definition of ‘home’ and, in doing so, pulling apart questions of existential security. Rent, the play suggested, contributed to a kind of inertia: all available resources (money, time, energy) were spent to keep a roof over one’s head. At different moments, the rented apartment seemed to embody rootedness or stuckness, solidity or stasis, comfort or confinement; moving to the new house might mean freedom, but it also came with the risk of lost identity, community, and shared history. How far does where you are either determine or explain who you are? We weren’t sure if any of the characters felt at home in the apartment, and, if they did, who was responsible for cultivating that homeliness. Each character seemed to experience the apartment and the imminent move in a different way—whether it was Lena, visualising a future for her family; Walter, coming into masculinity; or Beneatha, whose thinking towards Africa stemmed, in part, from her desire for belonging. Moving there might offer her a chance to reclaim ownership of an ancestral home, lost to enslavement.
We were struck by the way the production was staged. We stayed in the main room over the whole course of the play, with the apartment’s other rooms illuminated and viewed through gauze. We could see characters silently moving around, even after they’d shut the door, or waiting to re-enter the action—they were neither onstage nor offstage. This captured, so well, the thinness of the walls in a cheaply constructed building, and it suggested something about privacy: either that there was little privacy in cramped quarters, or, alternatively, that each character still could find small pockets of space here, to reflect and gather themselves. Unlike in, say, a nineteenth-century farce, this didn’t do anything for the plot: there wasn’t any eavesdropping or comic misunderstanding. Instead, it made us wonder how much space was allowed to the family and its individual members. What did it mean for them to fit around each other—practically, and emotionally? The use of props was equally effective. Furniture was moveable and multi-purpose: from the sofa that turned into a bed; to the extendable (or collapsible?) table; to the ironing board, which was often taken out, used, then put back again. The actors participated in this choreography of temporariness and of proximity. The very first scene was about the routines that wove around the communal bathroom in the building. When Lindner, from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, tried to prevent the Youngers from moving, he wanted to keep them folding into themselves. But the production was very alert to the Youngers’ adaptability—they made their space work. The most symbolically charged prop was, of course, Lena’s houseplant. We were clearly being asked to consider what made something grow. At the same time, this tiny pot of American soil harked back to the plantation and to the histories of enslavement and emancipation: Lena’s purchase of land and newfound access to a garden were especially affecting in this light.
Finally, we discussed the play’s historical and literary contexts. We learnt that the play was inspired by the life of Hansberry’s father: Carl Augustus Hansberry brought a suit, Hansberry v. Lee, to combat racist housing laws that perpetuated segregation. A Raisin in the Sun inhabits many genres, from the ‘great house’ play to the family saga. It takes Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956)—both set in apartments—and points out that housing discrimination and racism are inextricable. And it has had a rich and ongoing afterlife: we agreed that we’d be very eager to read, or see, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Beneatha’s Place (2013).
We were - and are - hugely grateful to the Playhouse for hosting our discussion, and to Sos Eltis for sharing her knowledge of Hansberry with us.
Rent Cultures Network, TORCH Networks
