Shockingly, in decades of theatregoing I’ve never seen Lorraine Hansberry’s pioneering 1959 play about a multi-generational black family trying to get ahead in still-segregated Chicago. Tinuke Craig’s fine-grained revival therefore comes as a delight and a revelation.
How modern, how prescient this debut work is, staged on Broadway when Hansberry was 29: and how awful that she died of pancreatic cancer at just 34. Craig’s production features terrific performances from Doreene Blackstock as matriarch Lena and Solomon Israel as her loved but unreliable son Walter.
