A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play, ends with its most optimistic character considering leaving the US with her Nigerian suitor, finding identity in an independent Africa. In his drama, Kwame Kwei-Armah takes Beneatha (Cherrelle Skeete) to Lagos – only to find colonialism’s enmeshed tentacles difficult to clear.
If Hansberry’s play is about ownership – whether Black Americans have a stake in the American dream – then Kwei-Armah’s concerns legacy: the persistent effects of colonialism and how Black thinkers can shape the future. After a first act set in 1959, the second returns a widowed Beneatha to present-day Lagos. Now a revered American social scientist, she brings her mostly white colleagues to her former home to discuss the future of the field – whether they should continue African American studies or instead launch a “Critical Whiteness” major. Are white students bored of guilt and Black students of this grim heritage? Is it true that “race as we know it is dead”?
Kwei-Armah’s play premiered in Baltimore in 2013, alongside a revival of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park – another riposte to Hansberry, but fuelled by gleeful provocation. Beneatha’s Place mirrors its structure – one act of uneasy encounters, a second unfolding like a symposium, as Beneatha gently provokes her colleagues to stomp on eggshells and say the unsayable.
Skeete, always a class act, is needle-sharp as Beneatha. Everyone else plays dual roles: notable are Zackary Momoh as Joseph, Beneatha’s idealist husband, Jumoké Fashola’s scathing auntie and Sebastian Armesto’s grandstanding academic, the white head of African American studies who hangs out on Black Twitter.
Always engaging, the play never quite ignites. Kwei-Armah’s dialogue often lands squarely on the nose, and the fervid culture wars rhetoric remains thin. The playwright’s own production can feel staid, lining up academics across the stage. It is jolted by Joseph’s collection of lividly racist memorabilia – masks and figurines from the Jim Crow era. They sit like wounds in Debbie Duru’s sober interior: both a reproach and a spur, they are reminders of how far the characters have travelled, of what they still carry, of how readily Black identity can be dragged back or disfigured.
• At the Young Vic, London, until 5 August.
