The purpose of her art

I was off to an orchestra concert last night – two works by Richard Strauss and a symphony by Johannes Brahms. That’s music by two German composers played by a French pianist led by a French conductor. A fine evening.

Friday night I went to a performance by a very good community theater group in Detroit, the Park Players from the North Rosedale Park neighborhood. A friend and colleague from my days in the auto industry got involved with this group a few years ago and is now serving as the board president. This show was presented in the neighborhood community house. Their website shows their new home in a nearby restored theater (complete with pipe organ!). The Detroit News wrote about the move.

The play was To Be Young, Gifted, and Black; A Portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who she was, though many years ago I saw her one famous play, A Raisin in the Sun.

The show I saw on Saturday told a bit about Hansberry’s life. In the first act we see scenes of that life between selected scenes from Raisin. That famous play is about a black family moving to a white suburb. This is a story that Hansberry lived. It was her father who challenged racial residency laws in a case that went to the Supremes. The play went to Broadway, making Hansberry the first black woman playwright on Broadway.

The second act was about the rest of Hansberry’s life, some of it about struggling how to follow such a success and to what purpose her art should serve. That story is interspersed with scenes from her much less famous play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. One major scene is about a Park Avenue woman annoyed that her sister married a Jew and trying to prevent her second sister from marrying even worse.

My friend said the play was written (assembled?) by Hansberry’s husband after she died much too young from cancer. The original play specified eight actors playing all the characters. This troupe divided the characters amongst 28 actors, including several playing Hansberry at different times in her life. Friday usually isn’t a slow night for this theater, but the night I went the audience barely outnumbered the cast.