A Raisin in the Sun

We just can’t quit the Youngers. Since its groundbreaking Broadway première, in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” has returned in starry revivals and high-school syllabi, revered and reframed (as in Bruce Norris’s 2010 spinoff, “Clybourne Park”) and reckoned with across the decades. But the story of the Youngers—a Black working-class family on Chicago’s South Side wrestling with aspiration after receiving their patriarch’s life-insurance payout—never seems to resolve. Even Hansberry, the first Black female playwright to be produced on Broadway, felt that the warm response to the play’s première overlooked her radical intentions. She might have found a kindred spirit in Robert O’Hara, the bold writer-director who staged Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” and wrote such boundary-pushing works as “Bootycandy” and “Barbecue.” O’Hara directs a “Raisin” revival at the Public (beginning previews on Sept. 27), led by Tonya Pinkins as the matriarch, Lena Younger.