After Lorraine Hansberry’s untimely death, Robert Nemiroff, her former husband and literary executor, edited versions of her writings and adapted them for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. He also expanded that work into an informal autobiography of the same title. In Nemiroff’s words, the work is “biography and autobiography, part fact, part fiction, an act of re-creation utilizing first person materials as well as, inferentially, autobiographical projections of herself in her characters.”
“Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” James Baldwin said of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. Characters from Hansberry’s plays, including the character of Lorraine Hansberry, portray and relate various strands of African American life in modern America. Walter Lee, for example, embodies the frustrations of black men trying to cope in an economic system that promises advancement but holds them back because of their race. His sister, Beneatha, is an example of the gifted, intelligent black woman (not unlike Hansberry herself) who aspires to participate fully in the American culture. She also, as does Asagai, the Africanist intellectual, strives to remember her African roots.
Then there is Sidney Brustein of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), the play most represented in To Be Young,...
(The entire section is 487 words.)