Astonish Me!: First Nights That Changed the World

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Push On Out and Do Something Bigger

A TALE OF LORRAINE HANSBERRY

8 PM, 10 MARCH 1959, BARRYMORE THEATRE, NEW YORK

The first and only Broadway preview of A Raisin in the Sun was about to begin. Philip Rose, the show’s producer, shuffled his way towards his seat. For the preceding half hour he had been hiding in a cubicle in the men’s room. Short of breath, nauseous, his vision swirling with anxiety, he looked through the gathering for the one person who could offer an exit route from his panic.

The crowd were made up largely of theatre folk, mostly white. They were drawn by the young Sidney Poitier, who enjoyed the fizzing aura of an actor on the cusp of stardom, but not by much else. The advance bookings were horrendous. The subject of the play, the determination of a Black family to move to a white neighbourhood, was not a seller. The producer, director and playwright had never worked on Broadway before, so they weren’t going to shift tickets. The fact that the director, Lloyd Richards, was the first Black man to helm a Broadway show, and the playwright the first woman of colour to write for the Great White Way, should have ignited curiosity. But New York’s radical audience would at best fill a third of the stalls for a single show. The other 99.99 per cent were not after an experiment; they wanted some razzle-dazzle.

Rose pushed through to the back of the stalls. His destination was the face that smiled towards him, a face with eyes steady, and lips wrinkled with a twist of humour: the playwright, only twenty-nine years old, and the wisest head in the room. She exuded calm and a mischievous sense of her destiny. She knew why she was there. In her presence, no matter the difficulties, everyone felt the angels were onside. They held hands, squeezing each other’s fingers too tight.

This was the culmination of several years of mould-breaking, and taboo-busting. Everything depended on the next two nights. The play began. And was a bit dull. The production had played seven weeks out of town, and somehow it slouched. Everything was slow – the entrances, the movements, the words. Soon enough, the audience began that ancient ritual of disapproval, the communal cough. What, the coughs rumbled, was this play doing here?

At the first interval, an air of panic hovered over the polite applause, and a number of punters left. At the second, the press agent grabbed Rose, and said, ‘We need to talk.’ He dragged him off to a nearby bar, bought him a drink and talked tough. ‘You can open tomorrow and post closing notices immediately. It’ll get slaughtered. Or you can delay the opening for two weeks. I’ll call Elia Kazan. He’s a friend. He can redirect and do some rewriting. Maybe, just maybe, it can be fixed.’

This PR guy was a senior New York player: Philip Rose was a sweet newcomer. ‘Why are you telling me this? There is nothing I can do.’

‘This is New York. Look at this audience. You think they’re enthusiastic?’

Rose stood up, winded. This was all his nightmares bunching together. ‘Let me go and watch the end of the play. I can’t accept those options. But I’ll think about getting drunk.’

The applause at the end was polite, but a long way from celebratory. Rose, with some colleagues, fulfilled his pledge to get smashed. Soon, worse news arrived. They were up late enough to see the next day’s papers. Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennessee Williams had just premiered and all seven major journals were full of praise for its wonders. Any theatre person knows the critics have a limited budget of goodwill, and you don’t want them spending it before they visit your shop. For the Williams play, they had used up their superlatives not only for the week, but for the whole year.

During some light rehearsal the next day, the atmosphere was glum. Everyone acted brave, though the polite response of the night before had killed optimism. At six o’clock, flowers and gifts started arriving, and people began the roundelay from dressing room to dressing room, with rictus smiles, messages of hope and eyes of terror. The playwright spent the afternoon setting and styling her hair, and climbed into a chic black dress, set off by dazzling earrings. She walked up to the theatre with her husband from their apartment in West Village. An enclave formed around her in the fourth row of family and friends .

Lorraine Hansberry was about to arrive in history.

MAY 24 1963, 24 CENTRAL PARK SOUTH, MANHATTAN

In a flat belonging to his family, an extraordinary meeting is convened by the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, brother to the President. In the southern states, a febrile state of tension, pressure cooking for over a century, is poised to explode. The long sickness of segregation and exclusion, and the institutionalised racism which underpins it, has been focused in street battles in Birmingham, Alabama. The crisis has crystallised in a single image – a Black woman pushed to the ground by policemen and held down by an officer pressing his knee into her neck.

The meeting – of political and cultural leaders – is to discuss what can be done. The NAACP is there, and the lieutenants of Martin Luther King, together with Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne. So too is Lorraine Hansberry and her great friend, James Baldwin. There is a perception that Kennedy is flattering those present by inviting them into his home, allowing them an influence congruent with their exceptional status. Many are seduced by this. Some aren’t.

One of those present, Jerome Smith, is neither celebrity nor political leader. He is a Freedom Rider from the South, one of those who boarded buses crossing the countryside and sat in areas designated ‘Whites Only’. His reward has been frequent beatings by the police; he is in New York to have surgery on his jaw after one such beating. Smith does not know sophisticated New York manners, nor high-status deference and poise. He is from the streets. Before Kennedy can set an agenda, he goes off like a blunderbuss. He lambasts the lawmakers and law-keepers of the South, talking of his own brutalised experience in volcanic eruptions.

Robert Kennedy makes a clumsy play. He turns to the rest of the room with a ‘who-is-this-guy?’ look. He attempts to exclude Smith as an uncouth southerner and to guide the discussion back to political niceties. Many are prepared to allow this, overwhelmed by Kennedy’s charisma. But not Lorraine. There are many reasons to love her, but few greater than for what she does next. James Baldwin said she had a capacity to tower over the room, even when sitting down. This is one such moment.

She interrupts Kennedy while he is talking, greatly to his surprise, and says: ‘You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr Attorney General; but the only man you should be listening to is that man over there [pointing at Smith]. That is the voice of twenty-two million people.’ Kennedy stares flabbergasted, stopped in his tracks. What was supposed to be a Manhattan salon is proving more turbulent and less easy to accommodate than expected. Lorraine goes on: ‘We are not remotely interested in the insulting concept of the exceptional negro, we are not remotely interested in tea at the White House … We are one people and as far as we are concerned we are represented by the negroes on the streets of Birmingham … We would like from you a moral commitment!’

Kennedy looks insulted. He and his family believe they own America’s moral positions. As Smith continues, and Kennedy persists in ignoring him, Lorraine stands up again and sums up: ‘What I am very worried about … is the state of the civilisation which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.’ With a thin smile at Kennedy, she walks out. Most follow.

Much about the meeting was repugnant to Lorraine, but mainly it was the invitation to become part of some exclusive club. For her, the cause wasn’t to be represented by leaders and celebrities, it was being led by the Black working class. They were living the difficult lives and fighting the hardest battles. Their only representative in the room was Jerome Smith, and, if he didn’t have the manners or the articulacy of Third Avenue, all the more reason to listen. The problem wasn’t only racism, it was also top-tableism. It was not good enough to invite certain people to sit on a dais; the dais had to be levelled.

Some of the emotional overspill of this meeting can be seen in the interview Baldwin did straight after with a New York psychologist, Dr Kenneth Clark. He looks shocked and in the process of absorbing fresh truths. In this legendary piece of television, he picks up the words of his friend Lorraine, of the need for the US government to make ‘a moral commitment’. Though Robert Kennedy thought the meeting had been useless, a month later his brother Jack proposed the legislation that would become the Civil Rights Act. When he did, he spoke of more than a political movement; he spoke of ‘a moral commitment’.

In the five years since her play opened, Lorraine Hansberry had come a long way. Even further than from her beginnings on Chicago’s South Side.

THEY FOUGHT BACK!

Lorraine Hansberry was born on 19 May 1930, into a family set-up full of contradictions. She learnt early that fighting each day with grace and humour was the only way to avoid being crushed by them.

Her family lived in a working-class Black neighbourhood on the South Side of Chicago, yet their wealth and connections isolated them. Her father Carl was known as the ‘Kitchenette King’ and was a real estate entrepreneur among the Black community. His balancing act was a firm belief in both civil rights and capitalism. For him progression was getting ahead. Lorraine’s uncle Leo was a pioneering scholar of African studies, a pupil of W.E.B. Du Bois, who himself taught both Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first President of Nigeria. Many of the tensions which played through Lorraine’s life and art – assimilation vs opposition, communitarianism vs getting ahead, and how to balance the international and the local – were written into her story early.

As was the need to fight. As a child she remembered ‘skinny little South Side bodies panting the hours away – with kids who fought – Blacks and whites’. Walking home from school, she would be a target for white kids because she was Black, and for Black kids because of her class. As she said of the South Side, ‘Each piece of our living is a protest.’ She never forgot the moment she saw a group of Black youths turning up with baseball bats to chase off a crowd of white racists: ‘THEY FOUGHT BACK!!!’ Throughout her life, she would never shy from a scrap.

Her father fought one of the defining battles of the time. In 1937, real estate was the borderland of race relations in the northern states. Carl Hansberry had set his sights on living at 6140 Rhodes Avenue, Chicago, a building whose access was limited by a racially restrictive covenant. Enlisting the help of the NAACP, Carl went to war through the courts. Soon his family were under siege, a mob of angry whites patrolling outside. They were cursed and spat on when they went out. Lorraine’s mother wandered their home at night with a Luger pistol. One evening a bladed block of cement was hurled through their window and lodged itself in plaster near the head of the seven-year-old Lorraine. After three years, they won their case in the Supreme Court.

These traumas Lorraine later chose to turn into art, in a play about people, their homes and communities. Given the freight of pain, it is astonishing how light and human her work is. The anguish was felt, but it was never allowed to conceal the messy comedy of life. Accuracy was what mattered. As she said over and over, the path to universality is through the specific. The family in her play, the Youngers, were not ‘a general family, not a general Black family, not a US Black family, they were a Black family from the South Side of Chicago’.

Lorraine attended the University of Wisconsin. Her passion for drama ignited when she went to see Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. ‘I remember sitting there consumed as that wail rose and hummed through the tenement, through Dublin, through Ireland itself, and then mingled with seas to become something of the Irish wail that was all of us … ’ She fell for both O’Casey and his earlier compatriot, J.M. Synge. She loved the honesty of their realism and its critical edge. They were not writing characters who were ‘a credit to the race’; they loved the flaws of their Irishmen and Irish-women alongside their glories. They were using ‘the most obvious instrument of Shakespeare: the human personality in its totality’. Their concern was not to judge, but to remove judgement, and allow life to flourish. Lorraine quoted the poet Weldon Johnson’s aspiration to follow the Irish: ‘What the coloured poet in the US needs to do is something like Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than symbols from without’.

Lorraine had a rich collection of linguistic seams to mine, the blues and gospel rhythms of Chicago, street patois, the new ideological language of university graduates, old phrases from the South, and the precision of her own poetry. O’Casey and Synge demonstrated how these languages could come alive in the mouths of ebullient and independent people.

FREEDOM IN NEW YORK

The world was shifting as Lorraine Hansberry was a student. Colonialism was coming to an end, the Cold War falling into rigid place, and America fissuring on ideological lines. Leaving Wisconsin, she headed for New York and to Greenwich Village, learning its manners and its arrogances, and it was not long before she was agitating. Hansberry was born to exemplify Joe Hill’s exhortation to organise. She joined any leftist society which passed her eye, and soon grew to lead them. An eager debater, she honed her skills at Speakers’ Corner in Harlem, coming to the attention of W.E.B. DuBois and the icon of radicalism, Paul Robeson.

She moved uptown to Harlem, and joined the tiny editorial staff of the journal Freedom, founded by Robeson. Here she resourced, received and edited articles, and began to write her own. Freedom was pitched well to the left of the NAACP, aiming to conjoin civil rights with revolutionary socialism. Lorraine was soon knocking out essays on anti-colonialism, civil rights and feminism. Argument has raged over whether she was a socialist first and a Black nationalist second, or vice versa. Or maybe for her they were dynamic and provocative companions pushing each other further. What she knew was that it was dangerous to settle on a single right, and that morality was always moving forward. Her instincts also told her the most dangerous people were those without humour. All the while, she fed her curiosity in theatre, enjoying evenings on and off Broadway. Friends recall her reciting chunks of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Synge, Arthur Miller and more. And they remembered her desire to talk theatre at any opportunity, besting them all with her knowledge.

Along the way she married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker. It is a relationship which defies diagnosis, and seems to have been born of shared political beliefs as much as passion. Nemiroff could be controlling after her death in management of her estate, but it is hard not to admire the depth of his commitment to her talent. Lorraine’s passions were reserved for her own sex. Typical of her, as soon as she was assured of her sexuality, she joined the appropriate society, a group called the Daughters of Bilitis, and started writing for their journal, The Ladder. Lorraine was intersectional long before the word was coined; happy to fight on behalf of her sexuality, her gender, her race, and all.

By a lucky break, though Nemiroff might not have been able to offer much love, he allowed her financial independence. He and a friend co-wrote the song ‘Cindy, Oh Cindy’, a piece of harmless pap which was such a number 1 smash hit it bought Hansberry the freedom and time to write. Now she could fight with art as well as activism. At a time when few Black writers had ever been produced on Broadway – and no Black woman ever – the very commitment to write was a challenge to the status quo.

BANANA CREAM PIE

One Saturday evening in 1957, Lorraine invited her friend Philip Rose to dinner at her apartment in Greenwich Village at 337 Bleecker Street. They were theatregoing companions and she wanted to read him sections from a play she was working on. She served spaghetti and banana cream pie, then read her scenes. A fire was lit in her friend’s imagination.

When he went home, the characters he had met in Lorraine’s play were still alive and chatty in his head. So much so that he couldn’t sleep. He had to meet this family again. At six-thirty in the morning, he rang Lorraine.

‘I want to produce your play.’

‘Are you nuts? It’s the middle of the night..

‘I want to – I can’t sleep..

‘I’m sorry you can’t sleep. It’s probably my cooking. Call me when it’s daylight. And take a Tums.’

They spoke the next day. Rose’s passion was persuasive enough to bypass the fact that his producing experience amounted to zero. They started bold, and continued so, hiring a Black director, Lloyd Richards, another first for Broadway. Lorraine carried on finishing her play, while Rose read books and manuals on how to produce, then started looking for money, a Sisyphean task which would consume the next two years. As they defined it, all looked hopeful apart from two obstacles; no-one would invest in the play and no-one would give them a theatre.

Regular backers did not believe an audience would come out to watch Black characters emoting. Some producers flirted with the project but demanded changes which undermined the play’s integrity; or they wanted a new director; or to downgrade the enterprise by hiding the production in a small theatre. One general manager told them to delay. ‘How long?’ they asked. ‘Ten, twenty years. The world may be ready by then’. Though the play is quiet and domestic, to these theatre owners it seemed to endanger the fabric of their buildings.

Yet miracles started occurring. A surprise cheque from here, an unforeseen commitment from there. The courage and the goodness were there, though lagging way behind what they needed. Securing a star would be the key.

TALK TO MY AGENT

Sidney Poitier had just filmed The Defiant Ones and Porgy and Bess and his star was in the ascendant. He had the special charisma of an energy about to break. Lorraine and Rose knew him from the Village scene, and invited him round to hear a mysterious new play, telling him Lorraine was going to read all the parts, though not that she was the author. After drinks and chat, Lorraine started. Soon, they were transported from Central Park West to a small apartment in Chicago. Poitier laughed and leant forward into the story.

At the end of the second act, he insisted on knowing the writer. They told him to guess. They laughed as he went through a list of big names, and they shook their heads. His last shot was the biggest name in town, the poet Langston Hughes, which delighted them all the more. Then, in shared recognition, they all shouted together, ‘Lorraine Hansberry!’ Poitier was fulsome in praise, then, rightly suspecting he had been set up, said he had to rush, and left. This was a relief to Lorraine, since her third act was still a shambles. But, once it was complete, it was sent to the star.

By this time Rose was in hospital, partly from exhaustion at the efforts to raise money. He was lying in bed, when he was told that Poitier had come to visit.

‘I’ve read your play. How sick are you?’

‘Sick enough that it won’t matter what you think. Take your best shot.’

‘Well, I have to tell you that I’ve decided, regretfully – to play the part.’

Rose shrieked and fell out of his bed, as Poitier ran off down the corridor throwing over his shoulder, ‘Talk to my agent’.

With a star on board, everything started to make sense. Money trickled in, though still way short of what was needed, and other casting fell into place. When the Black acting community found out there was a play with an ensemble of truthful Black characters, a thousand actors turned up to the open call. There was a history of Black characters in comedies, musicals and slapstick, the ‘dose, dese and dem’ kind of roles, but little that looked hard into their lives. Rose’s team secured Ruby Dee, who was something of a name, and found premium players for other parts.

Their struggle was with the central role of Mama, the family’s totem of steadiness, and their strongest link with their past. Late in the day, Claudia McNeil came in. Primarily known as a singer, she had recently played a small part in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and made a strong impression. For the team, she captured the essence of the role, even if she lacked experience. It was a gamble, but they went with her, and had a cast.

REHEARSALS

Rehearsals began on 27 December 1958 in the New Amsterdam Roof Garden Theatre on Times Square. This had once been a great theatre, but was now unused, as 42nd Street had become a no-go area. At the meet and greet, the reading flew. Lorraine charmed and Rose bustled around with a manic smile, a smile that concealed the fact he didn’t have a New York theatre to play in, nor the money to get to the end of rehearsals. He had secured one week in New Haven, and two in Philadelphia, but that was it. The objections were consistent. No white New York audience would pay to see a non-musical about Blacks, and there was no Black audience. Nonetheless, speeches of passion were made, and the reading flew.

While Rose charged around, Lorraine oversaw rehearsals. Her notes for the director survive. Giving notes is a delicate business: they must mix praise and sharpness, and have to define, through practical solutions, the aesthetic of a show. Hansberry’s are unimprovable. They encourage truth, wit, passion and dignity. Towards the end of rehearsals she saw a run which pleased everyone, but whose emotionalism alarmed her. She cautioned: ‘I like chocolate milk – yet there is nothing quite so nauseous as allowing all that chocolate syrup to fall in a mere one glass of milk. I feel precisely the same about excessive emotionality in a deeply emotional play. There are too many goddamned people on their knees at the end of that scene.’ Elsewhere, she defined her instructions in emphatic capitals: ‘PLAY WITH IMMENSE EMOTION AND UNBEARABLE RESTRAINT.’ She knew her range and wanted the actors in key. She sums up her argument with a beautiful metaphor: ‘I consider it a mistake to ever put the wail of tragedy into a mere drama. It makes the pot look so very much larger than the broth, that one can lose one’s appetite from hunger.’

At the end of rehearsals, there was a small run-through for friends. It was met with generous laughter, and a liberal use of tissues. The cast headed off on tour, though still without a New York run in place.

ON THE ROAD

Before the first performance in New Haven, Lorraine wrote to her mother: ‘Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life. And I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are – and just as mixed up – but above all we have, among our miserable and downtrodden ranks, people who are the very essence of human dignity.’

The show had an electrifying first night and its producers stayed up all night discussing it. Rose continued smiling manically, charming investors asking where the New York party was going to be, when he still didn’t have a theatre. When they moved to Philadelphia, the excitement grew. To everyone’s surprise, the audience was changing, and the proportion of Black attendees soaring. As the director remembered: ‘This woman in Philadelphia got to the window and asked for a ticket. It was, I think, $4.80. She started into the theatre and was surprised to be told she couldn’t go in until eight o’clock. So I asked her, Why are you paying $4.80 to come to this play? She said, The word’s going around my neighborhood that there’s something here that has to do with me.’

This was a time when Lorraine and James Baldwin grew from acquaintances to the firmest of friends. He was smitten by her: ‘a small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by impersonal ambition: she was not trying to make it – she was trying to keep the faith’. He was even more smitten by the experience of her play: ‘I had never in my life seen so many Black people in the theatre. And the reason was that never in the history of the American theatre had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on stage. Black people ignored the theatre because the theatre had always ignored them.’

Thankfully, some of the excitement from Philadelphia had filtered back to New York. John Shubert from the all-powerful Shubert Theatre chain came down to watch a matinee. It was a make-or-break moment. His approach was strange. He didn’t watch much of the play, but he did watch the audience – before and during the play and as they left. Their commitment was more important to him than anything on stage, and their commitment impressed. He spoke to Rose: ‘I guess I’ll have to give you a theatre. You can have the Barrymore in five weeks.’

‘What do I do with my show for five weeks?’

‘Go to Chicago – we have the Blackstone Theatre there – you can play there. Then the Barrymore.’

After two years of begging and politicking, all was settled in minutes.

THE G-MEN TAKE NOTE

It was not only the critics and the New York theatre scene keeping an eye on Lorraine. She had long been a subject of interest for the FBI. As the popularity of the play grew, and its effect on Black audiences sharpened their sense of themselves, the interest grew to alarm.

Seven years before, in March 1952, an invitation had come to Paul Robeson to attend an Inter-American peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. Robeson’s passport had been revoked by the government, so he had asked Lorraine to attend as his representative. She was to be one of five US delegates, amongst a group of 280. The conference had been planned for Argentina, then Brazil, then Chile. Each in turn banned it. In Uruguay, everyone attended in disguise, pretending they were convening for a huge party. At the conference, they played loud music and danced merrily outside, before retiring within to deliver earnest papers about the future of Marxism. At one point, while Lorraine was delivering a paper on feminism, word came in that the police were entering. Everyone hid notepads and pens in handbags, and pretended they were at a ladies’ tea party. The police glowered and left.

Outside there were mass demonstrations to legitimise the conference. Eventually these succeeded, so they were able to move outside, where the attendees grew to about 5,000. Lorraine spoke to the crowd – articulate and self-possessed – and played them a speech of Robeson’s. They went wild for this beautiful, unclouded twenty-two year old. She, too, was thrilled: ‘We began to walk, I shall never know where so many young people came from … they linked my arms with theirs and walked four abreast through the streets of Montevideo.’

A month after her return from Uruguay, the state department came to her mother’s home and took her passport away. The FBI began surveillance of her movements. Lorraine took a pseudonym for her socialist articles, John Henry, and another, Emily Jones, for her gay writing. But, as the tour progressed and gathered in popularity, the FBI collected reviews and playbills, and J. Edgar Hoover sent special agents along to see if the play was Communist. One reported back, quite astutely,:

The play contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such but deals essentially with negro aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advance themselves, and varied attempts at arriving at solutions … The quality of some of the acting was applauded, some of the lines drew applause primarily on a racial basis, others appeared to be applauded not only by negroes in the audience but by a substantial number of whites.

The FBI resolved to continue to monitor the play and bring Lorraine in after it had opened in New York. The pressure on a first night is intense in any circumstances. For Hansberry, given all the communities whose hopes and aspirations she had to match, it was extreme. To have the FBI breathing over her shoulder can’t have lightened the burden.

11 MARCH 1959, BARRYMORE THEATRE, NEW YORK

On the first night in New York, two hours after the lights had lowered in the auditorium, and Lorraine and her friends had held hands and breath, Sidney Poitier –Walter Younger – stepped forward on stage. He took time to find his words. The audience sat rigid with tension. By this stage, his choice was their choice, his need their need, his pain their pain, so entire was their engagement. His character’s task was to explain, with a concrete directness, why his family wished to occupy their new home, and why they would not be bought out by a neighbourhood representative alarmed by the idea of interracial communities.

The reticence and restrained emotion in his speech, as he recounted the history of his family, choked the audience. This wasn’t the cheap aspirin of manufactured catharsis, this was the live crackle of history on the move, impelled by the actions of the humble and defiant. Civil Rights progress might still be decades away, yet no-one could say that change had not occurred in that moment, as a rusted window on the future was pushed open. A Raisin in the Sun had arrived. The performance had been note-perfect. The energy which had gone AWOL the night before had surged into the room. Everything was fierce and exact, with theatrical precision – life in a state of poetry. Poitier was in a zone of fiery grace as he and McNeil blazed at each other and the rest of the cast shone. As the curtain closed, the audience went crazy, as call after call returned. The critics stopped in their shuffling exit at the back of the stalls to watch the unprecedented ovation.

Soon enough, the chant of ‘Author! Author!’ went up. Lorraine shrank into her seat, reluctant to take credit. Poitier was as reluctant to give credit away, until he noticed that his arm was being repeatedly punched. He turned to see his co-star, Ruby Dee, pounding him, hissing in a stage whisper, ‘Go get her, you son of a bitch. Go get her.’ Realising his responsibility, he leapt off stage, ran up the aisle as if flying, and practically carried her back. When Lorraine hit the light and bowed, an almighty roar went up.

Later, Rose and Hansberry made their way to Sardi’s, New York’s time-honoured post-show hang-out. Before entering, Lorraine said that, like Chekhov after his Seagull premiere, she wanted to run home and pull the covers over her head. But the doorman opened the door for her for the third time, and she was nudged forward. Once in the room, silhouetted at the top of the stairs, the whole room stood; everyone was clapping, even the waiters and busboys. Neither Hansberry nor Rose had realised just how many had wanted them to succeed. In his words, ‘A beautiful twenty-nine-year-old Black woman stood there – the face of change’.

There are few rushes of sweetly addictive energy more intoxicating than the sensation you are sitting on a Broadway hit. It is a brief mainline of pure adrenalised bliss. Less nutritious than crack, it is hard not to relish. We presented two Shakespeare shows from the Globe in the Belasco in 2013. The happy hour from when a circle of producers and press agents sat in the lobby of a hotel with their smartphones out, all shouting out the rave reviews simultaneously dropping online, through to the entrance at the grand party, where we took the leading players aside, and told them it was a major win, that hour was one of the most unhealthily happy of my life. On an earlier and more glorious journey, Lorraine and Rose went from Sardi’s to the Plaza Hotel, where everyone was gathered. Rose was told the reviews were raves, and announced the fact to the crowd. Mayhem ensued.

A few nights later the duo returned to Sardi’s for another party. There are a series of photos from that night, taken by the great Gordon Parks. They capture an impossible mix of 1950s hep cool and volcanic joy. Poitier, Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin all exhibit the difficulty of containing those two contradictory states. In some they exemplify effortless chill, sharply poised for the camera. In others, they are just busting with happiness. The crowd squeezed into this space ignite en masse with the same mix of hipster entitlement and exuberance. The walls are plastered with caricature portraits of old famous clientele. Their faces are white. The faces at the party, claiming this space for their own, are largely Black. One face stands out, making no attempt at self-possession, or self-presentation, just unfiltered joy. It is Lorraine. Her hair tousled, skin glistening, eyes alight, she is arriving in the annals of the great, and doing it with grace. There is none of the angry ‘Now! This is my moment!’; simply the relief of someone knowing she has done what she was meant to do. In one haunting shot, taken from behind a guitarist, Hansberry’s face has an erupting smile. The neck of the guitar crosses her at the neck, and her ecstatic face seems to float free from the rest of her body.

The tragedy is that Hansberry did not know many more nights like this. She would be dead within six years, from pancreatic cancer, at the age of thirty-four.

Somewhere in a less celebratory part of town, a man filed a report. Had the play flopped, the FBI would have brought Lorraine in. But ‘in reconsidering an interview with the subject, it is to be noted that the subject and her play have received considerable notoriety almost daily in the New York press – in view of this it is felt that an interview with her would be inadvisable’. No-one can argue with success, not even the G-men.

REBUILD THIS HOUSE

When James Baldwin was quizzed about the civil rights issues of the 1960s, he talked about a question of reality. That the dominant White culture had created an artificial reality which would not, and could not, admit the true nature of Black experience. It would neither recognise their alternate reality, nor help to forge a new inclusive one. Lorraine’s achievement was to show Black life as it was, to show it to a large audience, and shift their idea of the world around them. The way to fight is not only to attack the existing state of affairs, or to torch it; another way to fight a wrong world is to birth a new one.

In A Raisin in the Sun, after two acts of seething tension in the Younger apartment, Mama returns to the flat with the surprise that she has spent the insurance money they are fighting over. She has bought a new house in a white area. Everyone is astonished. This is not the answer to their antagonisms, this is an entirely new idea. ‘I just seen my family falling apart today … just falling to piece in front of my eyes … When it gets like that in life – you just got to do something different, push on out and do something bigger.’

The play’s action has been criticised by some, at the time and since, as assimilation, or bourgeois ambition. This is an injustice; the writing is too wise to say that aspiration is the answer. What Hansberry proposes is stepping forwards. Whether to a new address or to peace, justice, love and beauty, the first step has to be taken, no matter the confusions and compromises down the line. In a radio discussion, Baldwin and Hansberry concurred: ‘It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance. We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house.’ ‘Yes, and quickly.’

Nonetheless, the critics must have hurt. Norman Mailer patronised her and called her work ‘a play about insurance money’. Black radicals attacked her for instilling a middle-class sensibility into working-class life. The Left was suspicious of her success, and had ample evidence to lampoon her, primarily in the cringingly patronising coverage of Lorraine in the press. The apogee of this was a critic who wrote of his pleasure at seeing how ‘our dusky brethren [could] come up with a song, and hum their troubles away’. Lorraine felt these attacks, recorded them, and did her best