Nothing quite sets the tone of American hardship than Lorraine Hansberry's iconic play of a family struggling to make ends meet. While A Raisin in the Sun has seen productions the nation over, it finds a perfect fit in the metropolitan center of Buffalo.
Subversive Theatre Collective, temporary home of A Raisin in the Sun, uses this production to continue its aims to be a "people's theatre" and to "raise awareness, provoke, challenge, empower, incense, inspire, and even agitate."
Set in the post-World War II Chicago's Southside, the play focuses on a struggling African American family as it is about to receive a large insurance check from the deceased patriarch's life policy.
The matriarch, Lena (Beverly Crowell), decides to use some money to buy a new house for the growing family of her son Walter Lee (Peter Johnson) and daughter-in-law Ruth (Candace Whitfield) and set the rest aside for Walter's investments and her daughter Beneatha's (Lydia Douglas) medical school. Emotions run high when the twists of everyday life compromise some of the family members' big plans.
The play takes on themes like material race relations, financial struggles, interfamilial relationships, class disparity, and identity, to name a few. Essentially, A Raisin in the Sun attacks all the issues that still plague our society today. Victoria Perez, director of the play and member of the Subversive Theatre Collective, said that it is precisely this thematic timelessness that makes the play a bit easier to execute, despite its heavy subject matter.
"It's so universal," Perez said. "They are topics that everyone can still understand, that everyone has still lived through. It's not something that is surreal. [The thematic realism] is not something that we have to build so much upon, but it's something that we have to dig for, because it's there."
The space used to house this play is especially distinctive, and it perfectly fits the production team's ideas for the play's execution. The play is performed in the tightly packed Manny Fried Playhouse in Buffalo, which seats a bit less than 50 people.
What is most striking about the layout of the theater is that it purposely thrusts the audience into the stage space, as the front row is on equal footing with the players and is just inches from the stage. Not only does this setup allow the audience to admire the painstaking detail of the set (from a 1940s-era record player and clock, right down to the flour containers atop the refrigerator), but it also allows for a real engagement with family's plight.
Seating and light designer Patrick Medlock-Turek, also a senior chemistry major at UB, confirms the layout of the theatre was a conscious decision.
"We had to make the space itself feel cramped," Medlock-Turek said. "A lot of times what they'll do is just put the seats [at a distance from the stage] and the actors [squarely in front of them], but we wanted to do something a little bit more interesting."
Perez notes that this also adds to the actor-audience relationship.
"[The play was] designed so that the audience feels the awkwardness of the space, of how tight they have to live together," Perez said. "We wanted the audience to practically be in the living room."
While all the actors are extraordinary talents, the most notable performance was Beverly Crowell's Lena. Crowell wielded her maternal authority with power, pride, and emotion, allowing her to embody that gentle yet iron-fisted mother as though she has lived through the plight of the character she embodies.
Subversive Theatre's production of A Raisin in the Sun puts an interesting twist on an iconic classic, and it keeps the focus on the plight of the ordinary people, shunning all notions of theatrical elitism.
A Raisin in the Sun can be seen at Subversive Theatre through Feb. 25.
Email: arts@ubspectrum.com
