Impossible dreams
"What happens to a dream deferred?" poet Langston Hughes once mused. Yet "A Raisin in the Sun," the play that drew its title and inspiration from Hughes' poem, asks instead, what happens when dreams collide?
ABC and, yes, Sean "Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy" Combs bring the Tony Award-winning revival of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play to TV as a three-hour movie at 7 p.m. Monday on WLS Channel 7. With the Broadway cast intact, including Combs and the Tony-winning Phylicia Rashad as the family matriarch, it's a class production.
Yet it doesn't take someone obsessed with the current political scene to see it as an allegory for issues still in play. What is the greater evil, racism or sexism? And who deserves to go first, the black man in his demand for racial equality, or a woman in her demand for sexual equality?
Screenwriter Paris Qualles tries to bring the play up to date, even as it remains set in Chicago in 1959. And the cast too brings new nuances to the fore, especially Combs, who is a much more grudging, less eloquent Walter Lee Jr. than was Sidney Poitier. Yet Qualles can't escape that basic conflict of racism vs. sexism, and she can't help coming down on the matter in the way it would have seemed most settled 50 years ago, even as it leaves the story hanging just at the point where a contemporary film would most likely pick it up.
"Raisin" is set in motion by the recent death of Walter Lee Sr. As the play opens, the family is awaiting the arrival of a $10,000 life-insurance check. Suddenly, each of their dreams is within reach.
"He believed in dreams, that man did," says Rashad's Lena, "although none of his ever saw fit to come true."
Yet they're still facing limited resources and rival aspirations. Lena wants a house, which appeals also to Walter Jr.'s wife, Ruth, played by Audra McDonald, and their son, Travis. Yet Walter Jr. is already making plans with his best buddy Bobo (the dependable Bill Nunn from Spike Lee's old acting troupe) to use the money to buy a liquor store. Walter's younger sister, Sanaa Lathan's Beneatha, meanwhile, wants to go to medical school, even as she deals with the family reputation of being flighty.
"I don't flit," she insists. "I experiment with different forms of expression."
She's also experimenting with two completely different forms of boyfriend: Sean Patrick Thomas' achievement-oriented George and David Oyelowo's Afrocentric Nigerian academic Joseph Asagai.
What's interesting about "Raisin," and what was groundbreaking about it a half-century ago, is it rejects any notion of a monolithic blackness. Even within the family, these are all individuals with competing interests. And they mix it up pretty good. Beneatha gets herself slapped for promoting atheism, and when Walter suggests, "Money is life," Lena counters, "I remember a time when freedom was life."
The dead father hovers over it all. When the check arrives, Lena dismisses it as "somebody's idea of what my Walter was worth," and later on Joseph will suggest "there is something wrong in a house where all the dreams depend on a man dying."
Add to that Ruth's pregnancy as she considers an abortion as a cure for "acute ghetto-itis," and you have a turbulent mix of character and conflict.
Yet when Lena settles things by using part of the money to buy a house -- in an all-white neighborhood, no less -- instead of resolving conflicts it only puts them on a path to pat solutions. Without giving anything away, one key development is telegraphed and unconvincing, a character played by John Stamos is introduced as little more than a plot device, and in the end the story stops just when the drama seems about to erupt, the way it would in a contemporary film.
The man gets his dramatic needs addressed, but the women, for the most part, have theirs deferred. They have to accept what goes down without complaint.
This "Raisin" production is exquisitely well-played, and no one can blame it for not resolving issues that figure to trouble future generations. Yet the ending as it stands seems more dishonest, more of a sellout, than in the original. To borrow a phrase from Mavis Staples' latest album, we'll never turn back to the half-baked solutions of the past. We want it all, even when, as in the choice between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it's impossible to have it both ways.