Biography

Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1930. She was the daughter of a real estate entrepreneur, Carl Hansberry, and schoolteacher, Nannie Hansberry, as well as the niece of Pan-Africanist scholar and college professor Leo Hansberry. Her own family’s landmark court case against discriminatory real estate covenants in Chicago would serve as inspiration for her seminal Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun. Raisin, her best-known work, would eventually become a highly lauded film starring Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and Diana Sands.

Hansberry originally wanted to be an artist when she attended the University of Wisconsin, but soon changed her focus to study drama and stage design. After two years, she left college for New York to serve as a writer and editor of Paul Robeson’s left-wing newspaper Freedom. Hansberry, an outspoken Communist, was committed to racial equity and participated in civil rights demonstrations. It was at one of these demonstrations that Hansberry met her husband and closest friend, Robert Nemiroff.

Despite her being married, Hansberry secretly affirmed her homosexuality in various correspondence and in short stories later discovered in archives. She continued to write plays, short stories, and articles in addition to delivering speeches regarding race relations in the United States. She became close friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. It was with those friends and Nemiroff that she kept a secret about the pancreatic cancer that would eventually take her life on January 12, 1965, at age 34. Simone penned the song “Young, Gifted and Black” in tribute to her good friend. (Full Bio) 

Plays

A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1959)

Set on Chicago’s South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis, and matriarch Lena. When her deceased husband’s insurance money comes through, Mama Lena dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans: buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. The Younger family’s heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 12 (4f, 8m)

Characters: Ruth Younger, Travis Younger, Walter Lee Younger, Beneatha Younger, Lena Younger, Joseph Asagai, George Murchison, Karl Lindner, Bobo, Moving Men, Mrs. Johnson 

Publication: A Raisin in the Sun. Vintage Books, 1994 (Link)

A Raisin in the Sun. Samuel French, 1959. (Link)

THE DRINKING GOURD (1959)

The Drinking Gourd of the title is the Big Dipper. For a slave in the South it pointed the way North, the way to freedom. Hannibal, the main character, is a slave about 19 years old who is thinking about running away. Hannibal says the only good slave is a bad slave. To keep his human dignity he breaks tools, works slowly, plays sick and often disappears for hours at a time.  Because his mother is the master’s most trusted slave – she cooks for him – the master never comes down hard on Hannibal. But then, he gets old and sick and his 30-year-old son Everett takes over and works the slaves harder and longer because the soil is giving out. He hires an overseer who makes an example of Hannibal with devastating consequences. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 19+ 

Characters: The Soldier, Rissa, Sarah, Joshua, Hannibal, Hiram Sweet, Maria Sweet, Two Male House Servants, Everett Sweet, Tommy, Dr. Macon Bullett, Zeb Dudley, Elizabeth Dudley, Two Dudley Children, The Preacher, Coffin, A Driver, Slaves

Publication: The Collected Last Plays: Les Blancs; The Drinking Gourd;  What Use Are Flowers?. Vintage Books, 1994. (Link)

WHAT USE ARE FLOWERS? (1961)

At fifty-eight years of age Professor Charles Lewis Lawson, the principal character in What Use Are Flowers? gave up his position as a teacher of English and retired to a forest, where he became a hermit and remained twenty years. When, at the beginning of the action in the drama, he returns to "a plain somewhere in the world," he finds that civilization has been destroyed, presumably by war, and that peaceful desolation prevails there. The only survivors he finds are a group of savage children none of whom are more than ten years old. Lawson, now called the Hermit, endeavors to civilize the children by teaching them to understand, among other things, nature, beauty, and human relationships and responsibilities. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 3+

Characters: An Elderly and Scholarly Hermit, A Party of Children About Nine or Ten Years Old

Publication: The Collected Last Plays: Les Blancs; The Drinking Gourd;  What Use Are Flowers?. Vintage Books, 1994. (Link)

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW (1964)

This is the probing, hilarious and provocative story of Sidney, a disenchanted Greenwich Village intellectual, his wife Iris, an aspiring actress, and their colorful circle of friends and relations. Set against the shenanigans of a stormy political campaign, the play follows its characters in their unorthodox quests for meaningful lives in an age of corruption, alienation and cynicism. With compassion, humor and poignancy, the author examines questions concerning the fragility of love, morality and ethics, interracial relationships, drugs, rebellion, conformity and especially withdrawal from or commitment to the world. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 9 (3f, 6m)

Characters: David Ragin, Alton Scales, Sidney Brustein, Policeman, Mavis Parodus Bryson, Iris Parodus Brustein, Gloria Parodus, Wally O’Hara, Max

Publication: A Raisin in the Sun: and, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Vintage, 2004. (Link)

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK (1969)

A long-running success of the 1968/69 Off-Broadway season. Fast paced, powerful, touching and hilarious, this kaleidoscope of constantly shifting scenes, mood and images recreates the world of a great American woman and artist, Lorraine Hansberry. Uniquely and boldly, the play dramatically weaves through her life experiences and the times that shaped her. The actors slip ingeniously into and out of a variety of challenging roles spanning her life and experiences to the ultimate confrontation when cancer strikes her. Includes brilliantly highlighted scenes from her plays as well as letters, diaries, poems and personal reminiscences. A major statement of the American Black experience. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 8 (5f, 3m)

Characters: N/A

Publication: To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: A Portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Samuel French, 1999. (Link)

LES BLANCS (1970)

Les Blancs prophetically confronts the hope and tragedy of Africa in revolution. The setting is a white Christian mission in a colony about to explode. The time is that hour of reckoning when no one, the guilty nor the innocent, can evade the consequences of white colonialism and imperatives of black liberation. Tshembe Matoseh, the English educated son of a chief, has come home to bury his father. He finds his teenage brother a near alcoholic and his older brother a priest and traitor to his people. Forswearing politics and wanting only to return to his wife and child in England, Tshembe is drawn into the conflict symbolized by a woman dancer, the powerful Spirit of Africa who pursues him. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 17+ (3f, 14m)

Characters: Dr. Marta Gotterling, Dr. Willy Dekoven, African Child, Madame Neilson, Witch Doctor, Second Soldier, Second African, Peter, Abioseh Matoseh, Tshembe Matoseh, Charlie Morris, First Soldier, Warrior, Major George Rice, Eric, First African, Third African, Drummers

Publication: The Collected Last Plays: Les Blancs; The Drinking Gourd;  What Use Are Flowers?. Vintage Books, 1994. (Link)

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