“What happens to a dream deferred?” poet Langston Hughes wrote. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
In South Coast Repertory’s best production since the pandemic, a new mounting of Lorraine Hansberry’s treasured “A Raisin in the Sun” finds no aspect of quality deferred.
Direction, acting, staging and design, this is a fully realized manifestation of a seminal play.
While Hansberry’s 1959 drama may seem remote in time — though neither a neglected or outmoded work — director Khanisha Foster charges the text with staging vitality that showcases the playwright’s sublime weave of social issue themes with a nuclear Black family’s predicaments and preoccupations.
The result is that this “A Raisin in the Sun” rings as true as ever in 2023.
This certainly seems to have its wellspring in Foster. She was born in Chicago. Her grandparents grew up in the neighborhood Lansberry writes about. The director wrote her graduate thesis on the playwright.
But homegrown knowledge is not a guarantee of artistic talent. It’s the assuredness with which Foster, and her impressive nine-member cast rowing together, apply boisterous, revealing energies that serve the gripping story.
A plot refresher of the barest outline: a lives-changing $10,000 life insurance check is arriving soon at the Younger family’s well-kept, but cockroach-ridden tenement slum apartment. Previously out-of-reach dreams — aspirations and values differ within this family’s three generations — may become realities.
At stake is reconciling that these Black lives matter. Not easy then — nor now — in an America that invariably tempts all have-nots with plenty but is perniciously effective at keeping goals and dreams out of reach unless they are seized.
The character most tormented at being limited and defined by America is Walter Lee Younger, evocatively captured by sensitive actor C.J. Lindsey.
Walter’s frustrations are not just racial, but also driven by his embracing classic American lust for materialism as the way to a better future. Lindsey is accomplished at conveying Walter’s tortured — and volcanic self-torturing — path to an ultimate clarity of understanding who he must be for his family to grab a worthy life.
Two women share Walter’s struggles, but constantly struggle for realization of their own needs.
As family matriarch, Lena Younger, Veralynn Jones conveys the tired, but undaunted, stalwart dignity of someone who values love and honor more than her son’s just seeming to want to grab America’s brass ring.
Tiffany Yvonne Cox is an affecting Ruth, daughter-in-law, wife and mother, a compass for this family, but with deeply felt frustrations and needs that she can’t realize on her own.
Two other family members feature live-wire performances, making it hard to take your eyes off either actor when they are on stage.
Ashembaga (Ashe) Jaafaru inhabits 20-year-old Beneatha Younger, Walter’s sister and Lena’s youngest daughter, with performance animation and youthful intensity that is flat out fabulous.
Foster and Jaafaru seem to have miraculously worked out an alchemy version of a Beneatha whose exuberant gyrations exploring youthful identity — as well as steering between polar opposite suitors — are simultaneously hyper-animated while perfectly fitted into the family as the beloved/maddening influencer.
Another actor you pay attention to in his every move is local newcomer Nathan Broxton playing Travis Younger. The middle-school performer’s optimistic naivete in the midst of this family’s struggles adds depth to a role via genuine stage presence, not just as a cute kid on stage.
There are three roles outside the family.
Beneatha’s would-be boyfriends are a self-searching Nigerian idealist (winningly and gently delivered by Kenyan actor Junior Nyong’o) and a smug, assured preppy (talented SCR and UC Irvine acting alum Tristan Turner).
Actor David Nevell is suitably squeamish as Karl Linder, the identifier of racial redlining, trying to suppress the family’s very essence as well as its rights as property owners.
SCR brass might have staged this on the Segerstrom main stage, but the choice of the cozier Argyros theater affords an excellent payoff.
Josafath Reynoso’s marvelous scenic design provides an atmospheric, detail-rich view into the Younger apartment, intimate in a way that supports the conflicts of the family dynamic.
Above the apartment is a cutaway panorama of the exteriors of the larger tenement area, with a rat’s nest of telephone and electrical wires conveying just enough of the trapped, claustrophobic circumstances surrounding the Youngers.
A final thought in the form of a tip and some practical advice on how to act on it.
For excellent live theater it’ll be hard to better than what is onstage here. SCR enjoyed well-deserved advance box office sales for the production, but recently added two extra performances on Tuesday, Nov. 7 and Sunday evening, Nov. 12.
A quick look online at these two new dates finds excellent opportunities; fleet fingers at the keyboard reserving seats will be extremely well rewarded.
‘A Raisin in the Sun’
Rating: 4 stars (out of four)
Where: Julianne Argyros Stage, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa
When: Through Nov. 12. 7:45 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays; 2 and 7:45 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Additional performances at 7:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 7 and Sunday, Nov. 12.
Tickets: $29-$105
Information: 714-708-5555; scr.org
