A Raisin in the Sun

A very good play by a very good playwright. I could pick out so so so many quotes from this play that are really meaningful about life and the real world. My favorite and one of the most interesting ones I thought was...

"At times it will seem like nothing changes at all...and then again...the sudden dramatic events which make history leap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long." ~ Joseph Asagai

This quote to me so perfectly fit the past, present, and future of Africa. The play was written in the 1950's; the era when African independence was just starting to emerge. Since those years following the independence movement, turmoil has struck the African continent. As Asagai said, "Guns, murder, revolution." As a sensitive reader and facinated historian, I am both amazed with the accuracy that Lorraine Hansberry predicted the events that would occur in Africa and also comforted by the thought that all of these atrocities could possibly conclude in a bright future for the continent.

We're doing a discussion group on this in preparation for Trinity's play this winter. Amazing that this wasn't all that long ago. Some familial patterns are so predictable. The racial tensions are dismaying. Sadly, they are not all gone, either. Can't wait to see this on stage and watch the reactions of my Liberian students from their cross cultural perspective.

This was required reading during my freshman year of high school. It was a good book and was quite enjoyable.

Just like the time I went to a play and didn't know it was over until the lights came up.
A decent play, but there are too many questions left unanswered at the end.

Read it in 2001, re-read it in 2008, taught it too back in 2006 at Humboldt. Now looking forward to seeing it at the Guthrie in 2009.

the only good part is when she puts "Maximum Indifference" in parenthesis. otherwise, another annoying civil rights book that you have to read for school. i wish that we could read real literature instead of the junk that is written to appeal to the teenage masses. I admit that this was important in its time, but now its just another title on the already too numerous list of works that we read in english class that have significant civil rights overtones. and if you say that it is an important part of african-american liteature, then i say that there must be some works that black people have written that havent been so outrageously influenced by the civil rights movement.

great book, must read more than once to catch the little things u didn't notice in the beginning that will make the book more intimate for you

I saw this performed in school. So much more is going on in this play than racial tension and discrimination. Themes such as family coherence, cultural identity, and manhood are universal.

I have never seen the play, but reading the play was awesome! Hansberry's detail to her characters is phenomenal.

I teach this play and absolutely love it. When you finish reading it, you MUST watch Sidney Poitier as Walter. What an amazing acting job. We can ALL learn about the universal issues in this play; it doesn't matter if you are black, white, rural, inner-city.