“Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams,” someone says in A Raisin in the Sun. Hearing that line on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—which is when TimeLine Theatre Company’s excellent revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic drama had its opening night—felt a little like being doused in cold water.
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A couple weeks ago in the Reader, Steve Bogira took a grim assessment of how black Chicagoans have fared since the march. “It could be called a progress report,” Bogira wrote, “except there’s little progress to report.” He found that a solid majority of the city’s African-Americans still live in segregated neighborhoods; nearly 20 percent are unemployed (compared to 8 percent of whites), and more than a third live in poverty. The median income for African-American households is half that of white ones.
Big Walter’s stalwart widow, Lena, wants to spend the money on a down payment for a house so that the family can finally move out of the shabby one-bedroom apartment they’ve lived in for decades. Daughter Beneatha, a budding feminist and Afrocentrist, needs tuition money for medical school if she’s going to heal the sick of Nigeria. Her brother, Walter Lee, has plans to invest in a liquor store. And Walter Lee’s bone-tired wife, Ruth, has a vague notion that a windfall means you might get to sit down for a few minutes.
In his vivid and admirably unsentimental staging, director Ron OJ Parson stays true to the script’s kitchen-sink realism without layering on so many period details that the play seems a relic of the past. There’s a 50s jazz soundtrack and at one point the smell of frying bacon, but touches like these never distract from the intensity and veracity of the performances—allowing us to appreciate, in case we had forgotten, the full power of Hansberry’s still-moving, still-contemporary masterpiece.
Through 11/17: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM TimeLine Theatre Company 615 W. Wellington 773-281-8463timelinetheatre.com $35-$48
