#NEGRO LITTLE THEATRE MOVEMENT HOW TO#

Explain restrictive covenant and provide the details of the historic court case Hansberry v.What has Raisin meant to the career opportunities of major African American performers? It also provides the opportunity to discuss the lineage of performers who have played Lena, Ruth, and Walter Lee Younger.

#NEGRO LITTLE THEATRE MOVEMENT HOW TO#

This teaches students the production history and how to use an important research tool.

Trace Raisin‘s production history by using the Internet Broadway Database.

The theatre section’s lead story is “Four Examples of The Orient’s Inscrutable Influence on Broadway,” which offers the opportunity to discuss how racism manifests in a variety of ways in theatre.

Assign the original New York Times review of A Raisin in the Sun ( raisin-original-review-full-page) for an analysis of content and the impact of visual culture (the review is literally marginalized in a thin column on the edge of the page).

I also like comparing the famous “eggs” exchange between Ruth and Walter in Act I, scene 1 of Raisin with Linda and Willy’s breakfast discussion at the top of Act II. This can be done, for instance, by comparing Miller and Hansberry’s very precise stage directions.

Compare and contrast with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), emphasizing staging the domestic space and heterosexual marriage.

If you have taught Harlem Renaissance drama and the works of Langston Hughes, start with his poem “ Harlem.”.

How did the different performance contexts of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit and, two decades later, a commercial production on Broadway, impact reception?.

How is Africa taken up in each play and how does that impact the dramatic action? How does it connect to international postcolonial movements? Assign p.903 of “ To Be(come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry’s Existentialist Routes to Anticolonialism” by Cheryl Higashida and discuss why the FBI would file a report focusing on Asagai’s character.

Why include the third generation? What is at stake having children on stage?.

How is the Great Migration staged through geography and character?.

What is the significance of Chicago as a geographical location in both plays?.

How do Ward and Hansberry use time as a dramatic tool for staging changes in Black American domestic life?.

What do these continuities and differences tell us about pre-WWII and post-WWII racial politics in the United States?.

Compare and contrast with Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938).

Du Bois’s 1926 call for “a real Negro theatre” to be “about us,” “by us,” “for us,” and “near us.” Would you categorize Raisin as a “propaganda play” in Du Bois’s definition or a “folk play” in Alain Locke’s definition?

Analyze the ways in which Hansberry’s drama does or does not fit W.E.B.

I’ve listed several assignment ideas/prompts for teaching Raisin.

Therefore, our discussion of Raisin focused on real estate, the nuclear family, masculinity, the agency of female characters, and commercial versus non-commercial theatre. They had read about the Negro Little Theatre movement, the Federal Theatre Project, and were assigned Big White Fogand Death of a Salesman. In my Modern US Drama class, students brought much more background about US history and performance context to Hansberry’s text. In addition, Ta-Nehisi Cotes’s “The Case for Reparations” had recently been published, and therefore the topic of systemic racism and economic justice was particularly topical. Therefore, our class discussion focused on the repeated tropes we had identified throughout the semester: across genres and historical periods, playwrights emphasize language and the body to mark racial specificity. In my intro class focusing on staging race and racism, the students had not read Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938) or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). I’ve taught A Raisin in the Sun in two different contexts. Are they theatre majors or non-majors? Did they read Raisin in high school and is this, therefore, an opportunity to go deeper into content and context? Is this a US drama survey class and/or a class focusing on race? Is this a script analysis or a theatre history class? Clearly, the approach you take depends on the learning goals for the department, the class, and the students you are teaching. There are so many ways to teach Raisin on the college level. Why is Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun, not found in the major drama anthologies many universities use for survey classes? Its absence is problematic, given its important place in drama history and literature, which is why we must make an extra effort to get the play into our students’ hands and into classroom learning.

Negro little theatre movement