A Raisin in the Sun (2004)
Opening Night: April 26, 2004
Closing: July 11, 2004
Theater: Bernard B. Jacobs
The play tells the story of three generations of a family living and struggling together under one roof. The Youngers – Mama, her children Beneatha and Walter Lee, and his wife Ruth and their son, Travis – live on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s. It is a place in which dreams, like the raisin in the Langston Hughes’ poem from which the play takes its title, wither and die if nothing is done with them.
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April 27, 2004
Sean Combs’s shadow precedes him at the Royale Theater. That’s literally as well as figuratively. In the moment before Mr. Combs makes his hotly awaited entrance in the seriously off-center revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s ”Raisin in the Sun,” which opened last night, his wavering shadow is cast from offstage, heralding his arrival like a soft, urgent fanfare. Audra McDonald, the first-rate actress playing his wife, calls his character’s name — ”Walter Lee, it’s time for you to get up!” — and you can feel the audience drawing a collective breath.
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