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In A Raisin in the Sun, the Younger family, led by proud, weary matriarch Lena, receives a sudden windfall of $10,000—proceeds from a life insurance policy on Lena’s recently deceased husband. Convinced that he can bring the family out of poverty by becoming a conscience-free capitalist, Lena’s son Walter wants to use the money to go in with questionable cohorts on a liquor store. Rebellious daughter Beneatha wants it for medical school, even though she can hardly manage guitar lessons. And Lena, the play’s moral center, imagines she can buy her family a little house and a new life on the north side, despite the fact that other black families that tried the same thing had their homes firebombed. In nearly every moment of the play, Hansberry dramatizes a family’s heart-breaking struggle against a predicament from which there’s no escape.
Clunie, on the other hand, dramatizes very little of her characters’ lives. Instead, she constructs a series of easy-to-follow discussions illustrating problems the Freemans allegedly face. Laid out so schematically, the issues feel imposed from above—displayed in a living room diorama rather than emerging from within the messy reality of life. Most everything feels calculated to teach a lesson rather than to illuminate a truth.
It’s not until much later in act two that Buddy actually does anything to justify the family’s fears, drawing the Freeman kids into a mess of drugs and drive-bys. As distasteful stereotypes of ghetto life pile up, Angela has a crisis of faith and refuses to move her kids to Garfield Park, even though the family’s already bought a spacious fixer-upper there. It’s in the resulting confrontation between Angela and her family that the play becomes politically ludicrous. Buying a house in Garfield Park and living among Scary Black People isn’t just held up as a laudable way for the Freemans to contribute to the betterment of their race—it’s likened to Rosa Parks’s decision to sit at the front of the bus.
