A few months before her death from pancreatic cancer in
early 1965, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry spoke about a letter to
the editor that she sent to, but that was ultimately rejected by, The
New York Times. Standing before
a racially integrated Town Hall audience in
New York, Ms. Hansberry, then 34, sought to counter the growing white
liberal criticism of the racial militancy expressed by a younger
generation of African-Americans.
“And I wrote to The Times and said, you know, ‘Can’t you understand
that this is the perspective from which we are now speaking?’” Hansberry
said. “It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, ‘what can we
do to irritate America?’ you know. It’s because that since 1619, Negroes
have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their
situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all.
There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted.”
This image of Hansberry — exasperated, fatigued and sympathetic to
the nationalist ideologies that would later blossom in the Black Power
movement — might surprise those who know her only through the success of
“A Raisin in the Sun.” With that much-lauded play, about a
working-class African-American family on the verge of racially
desegregating a Chicago suburb, Hansberry became the first
African-American woman to have a show produced on Broadway, in 1959.
But for Tracy Heather Strain, showing there was much more to
Hansberry than “A Raisin in the Sun” was the imperative driving the making of
“Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which
debuts Jan. 19 on “American Masters” on PBS. This includes her radical
leftist politics as well as her struggle to identify publicly as a black
lesbian in the 1950s and 1960s. “I started with the notion that people
did not know who Lorraine Hansberry was,” Ms. Strain said. “I didn’t
either, really. You see these pictures, she’s wearing the pearls, her
hair’s all done. She’s an icon, the picture of success during the civil
rights movement.”
Ms. Strain, 57, was 17 when she discovered Hansberry. But it was not
through “A Raisin in the Sun,” which has had critically acclaimed
revivals on Broadway (in 2004 and 2014) and has inspired other work like
Bruce Norris’s
“Clybourne Park” and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s
“Beneatha’s Place.” Her introduction came in 1978 in her hometown, Harrisburg, Pa., during a performance of “
To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a
play that Hansberry’s ex-husband and literary executor, Robert
Nemiroff, adapted posthumously from her unpublished letters and diary
entries.
“I’d never encountered a young black woman sharing her inner thoughts
before, and those thoughts and observations were remarkably similar to
the ones that I had about things like race, gender and class,” Ms.
Strain said. “It stayed in the back of my mind for a long time.”
As she pursued a career in documentaries, producing and directing
documentaries like “Unnatural Causes” (2008) and “I’ll Make Me a World: A
Century of African-American Arts” (1999), Ms. Strain found herself
drawn to her subject. She produced and directed a short TV segment on “A
Raisin in the Sun” in 1999. Five years later, she met with Chiz
Schultz, a film producer who not only had exclusive access to
Hansberry’s materials, but was also in search of a director for his
Hansberry documentary. (Mr. Schultz is an executive producer on the
film, which was budgeted at $1.5 million.)
Through interviews with the original cast of the stage and film
versions of “A Raisin in the Sun,” including Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee
and Louis Gossett Jr., as well as her fellow artist-activist, Harry
Belafonte, Ms. Strain tries to capture the revolutionary nature of
Hansberry’s play. “It was like Lorraine opened a new chapter in
theater,” Ms. Dee recalls in the film, describing the standing ovation
and riveting response on opening night. “That included black people.”
LaTanya Richardson Jackson, the narrator of “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” whose performance as Lena Younger in the
2014 Broadway revival of
“A Raisin in the Sun” received a Tony Award nomination, sees the
character of Beneatha, Lena’s adult daughter, as ahead of her time. Not
only does she turn down the advances, and in one case a marriage
proposal, from her two male suitors, but she also plans to be a doctor
and proclaims to be atheist in a staunchly Christian household.
“She had a very feminist, ‘why not me’ point of view, whereas her
mother just assumed the status quo of ‘your brother should lead the
family,’” Ms. Jackson said. “She respected that, but she also challenged
that his notion of living was any better than hers.”
Like Beneatha, Hansberry was an intellectual in an era when women and
African-Americans were denied full admission into that rarefied
category. “The stereotype of African-Americans in this country was that
we weren’t thinkers, but Hansberry was thinking, batting around ideas,
putting forth ‘what ifs’ and challenging suppositions that everyone else
took for granted,” Ms. Jackson said.
The film emphasizes that despite the success of “A Raisin in the
Sun,” Hansberry was frustrated with the common interpretation of it as a
play of optimism or integration. Her family history helped shape her
beliefs about the limits of turning to the courts for racial justice.
Her parents’ legal challenge of Chicago’s restrictive racial housing
covenants, in a case that went to the Supreme Court in 1940, was
successful, but black and white people remained segregated and mob
violence often greeted the African-American families that moved in, such
as hers. And “my father died a disillusioned exile in another country,”
Hansberry lamented at that Town Hall meeting.
Hansberry responded to her father’s fate by moving beyond theater to
pursue her larger goal of social change. Seeking to underscore the
racial particularities of her play, for example, she tried again with a
film version of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The studio rejected her first two
screenplay drafts and finally accepted the third one; ultimately, the
film was not as successful as the play.
“Hansberry experimented with a variety of forms, which includes the
essay, long-form fiction, short stories as well being a visual artist
and a painter,” said Imani Perry, author of the forthcoming “Looking for
Lorraine: A Life of Lorraine Hansberry” and a professor of
African-American studies at Princeton. “And she was also was fairly
ecumenical in terms of her political activism.” Hansberry was concerned
with racial justice, colonialism and feminism; she joined the Communist
Party and led the Young Progressives group at the University of
Wisconsin in 1948.
For Hansberry, however, art was not simply an expression of her civil
rights concerns but a space where she could wage racial and gender
battles and find resolutions that were more liberating than the law.
The documentary also wrestles directly with her sexuality, rather
than avoid or allude to Hansberry’s same-sex relationships (the way some
recent documentaries on
James Baldwin and
Nina Simonehave).
Her lesbianism was a source of conflict and comfort and helped shape
her feminist politics. The film also recognizes that even though
Hansberry never denied her attraction to women, she did not actively
publicize it.
Instead, as she was working on the play that canonized her place in
the civil rights movement, she was also writing, under the initials
L.H.N. or L.N., letters to “The Ladder,” the first subscription-based
lesbian publication in the United States. Hansberry’s preoccupation with
women’s financial and sexual independence was not limited to these
semi-anonymous letters, but a theme that she infused throughout her
work, even “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Though she may have written in an era that precedes “what we think of
mainstream feminist movement,” Ms. Perry said, “Hansberry stands out
today because she was thinking about what a feminist future looks like.”
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