A Dream Deferred

To the Playhouse tonight to see Eclipse Theatre Co's terrific production of 'A Raisin in the Sun' by the great Lorraine Hansberry www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vvYXnd8FwM

The play, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for 'Best Play' in 1959, tells the story of the Younger family - a Black family in 1950s Chicago - and their struggles to make better lives for themselves - each with their individual hopes and dreams of what 'a better life' entails and of how best to make use of a $10,000 life insurance cheque.

Hansberry was an amazing woman who, sadly, died in 1965 aged only 34 but who left an extraordinary legacy in this play which was remarkably prescient in its discussions of race, class, gender and the repercussions of both slavery and colonialism. Issues which still, certainly, resonate here in the former slaving port of Liverpool, from which ships transported half of the 3 million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers.

Today's song, by Nina Simone, was directly inspired by Lorraine Hansberry www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3OIfuVpocU

And here's the Langston Hughes poem, 'Harlem' which gave the play its title...

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?