There are times when it’s difficult to distinguish between a director’s vision and those of individual performers. Then there are cases like the Public Theater’s new revival of A Raisin in the Sun, in which an absolutely stellar company is burdened with the ambitions of an overzealous leader.
That leader would be Robert O’Hara, whose subtlety-be-damned approach will come as no surprise to anyone who saw his production of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play a few years ago. Unlike that imaginative but overrated piece, Raisin—which made Lorraine Hansberry the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959—is a naturalistic work, inspired by Hansberry’s personal experience, tracing the aspirations and struggles of a Black family living on Chicago’s Southside. You’d be hard-pressed to name a play that addresses racism’s legacy or its obduracy more bluntly.
Alas, to see O’Hara’s take, you’d think he either doesn’t agree with this assessment or didn’t trust a contemporary audience to appreciate Raisin’s enduring power. His production is saddled with gimmicks, from a ghost that periodically haunts the cramped home protagonist Walter Lee Younger shares with his wife, son, mother and sister to an ostentatious shattering of the fourth wall at a key moment.
In case those tricks don’t rattle you to attention, the director literally spells out the bigotry facing the Youngers as a parting salvo.
All of which is a shame, because the acting in this production is superb, and O’Hara, to his credit, guides his players with both sensitivity and wit. Francois Battiste captures the qualities that make Walter Lee a fascinating almost-tragic hero, revealing the character’s struggle to walk the line between righteous pride and hubris in a muscular performance that can, when appropriate, be as funny as it is moving.
But it’s women who make the greatest impressions in this staging. Mandi Masden brings a no-nonsense strength and grace, as well as humor, to the role of Walter’s long-suffering wife, Ruth. Paige Gilbert’s comedic skills are more prominent, appropriately, in her portrayal of Beneatha, Walter’s feisty, ambitious kid sister—though Gilbert also reveals a tender sensuality in her scenes with Beneatha’s African love interest, Joseph Asagai, played here by an elegant John Clay III.
Best of all, perhaps, there’s the magnificent Tonya Pinkins, throwing vanity to the wind as a silver-haired, frumpy Lena Younger, Walter and Beneatha’s mom. Lena provides vital context for her children’s dreams and disappointments; hers is the stubborn voice of long. hard experience, if not always wise then relentlessly true, and loving even in anger.
Pinkins delivers a portrait of pained resilience that stings even as it glows. When Lena feels betrayed by her son or daughter, her sorrow sinks in deeper than any wrath could. When she admires their spirit—likening them, in one famous line, to a “little old plant that ain’t never had enough sunshine,” but has blossomed nonetheless—her sense of uplift, and fortitude, is irresistible.
While you’ll wish that O’Hara had felt less need to embellish such performances, or Hansberry’s text, this Raisin ultimately shines—not, like Lena’s plant, despite a lack of nourishment, but in spite of too much fuss.
A Raisin in the Sun opened October 25, 2022, at the Public Theater and runs through November 20. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
