The playwright who is a Negro is faced with a special problem. Broadway has a tradition of Negro shows, inevitably folksy or exotic, almost always musical, of which the only virtue is that Negro performers get a chance to appear as something more than filler. The obvious reaction to such shows is the protest play, the Negro agitprop, which can be as false to American Negro life as the musicals. A playwright with serious intentions, like Miss Hansberry, has to avoid both pitfalls, has to try to write not a N...

The compelling thing about Sidney Brustein is that although political commitment is the overriding concern, by and large the play is not about political issues in the usual sense. It concerns a small group of rather ordinary people who face a variety of real problems in their lives…. Sidney, in the midst of this group, has more "social conscience" than any of them but is really not up to the role of ethical and political standard-bearer that he pretends. Until Iris leaves him, his aware...

The people who surround Walter Lee are all trying to get him to adjust to the conditions of life for a Negro in a white man's world. All except Beneatha. Beneatha seeks her own escape first in a series of hobbies and fads, then in intellectualism and a desire to find her African roots. All this is played against the backdrop of a society that is indifferently hostile to the aspirations of black folk in an environment of ignorance, lassitude, hate, filth and poverty. The Younger's apartment is ...

To Be Young, Gifted and Black, as everyone knows by now, is a patchwork play pieced together by Robert Nemiroff from the produced and unproduced works, the letters, the speeches, the articles of Lorraine Hansberry. Subtitled "The World of Lorraine Hansberry," it is an attempt to present Miss Hansberry, the writer, and the background which produced her and provided the material for her work…. Whatever Nemiroff intended, the play made a mockery of Miss Hansberry's talents, destroye...

The Drinking Gourd, a three-act drama well suited for television presentation, is what may be called in television jargon a documentary on American plantation slavery. It is a compact yet comprehensive, authentic, and vivid portrayal of the "peculiar institution," correctly called the sum of all villainies, as it was especially in the cotton kingdom on the eve of the Civil War. The action in the drama is framed between a long prologue and a brief epilogue both of which are spoken by a soldier ...

[The Drinking Gourd] portrays American plantation slavery which … characterizes a phase of the black experience. The title was taken from a spiritual, "Follow the Drinking Gourd," linked with the Underground Railroad and derived from the slave metaphor for the Big Dipper which points to the North Star. This star was considered the beacon to freedom for many an escaped slave attempting to find his way to the North in the night. In the play, Hansberry illustrates the cruelties of slavery ...

Though Miss Hansberry is frequently guilty [in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] of ladling out words with a soup-spoon ("these two implacable pools of cynicism" are simply a man's eyes) and though she has wasted time name-dropping among Village intellectuals …, she has still forced a good many vigorous attitudes through the verbal smog and she sometimes finishes off an exchange as though a skull had been smartly cracked. What makes her virtues hard to ...

"Les Blancs" … is the play that Lorraine Hansberry left unfinished at her death in 1965 and it is as if the American racial dilemma of that time has been permanently frozen into her script. It is very strange to watch this play and, in a very real way, actually see the intelligent American mind of five years ago, struggling between old concepts of liberalism-civil rights and new ideas of militance…. Miss Hansberry's tragically brief playwriting career charted the postwar s...

In its transference from stage to screen, Lorraine Hansberry's deeply moving play about an impoverished but indestructable Negro family, has, alas, lost more than it has gained. On stage, the play literally whipped its way across the footlights to lash the audience with its verve and vigour. On film, its effect is at once less urgent and personal, and one seriously feels the lack of breathing space needed between us, the spectators of the action, and the action itself. We tend, as it were, to be too ...

Virtually all of "Les Blancs" is … vivid, stinging, intellectually alive, and what is there is mature work, ready to stand without apology alongside the completed work of our best craftsmen. The language in particular is … unmistakably stage language…. The anguish of [Tshembe's] decision is the burden of the play, but it becomes anguish only at the final curtain. Prior to that it is verbal sharpshooting of the most trenchant kind, fun when it is hurting….

["The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] is a play about idealism, liberalism and not selling-out, and it is written in something of the declamatory manner of the thirties, although its theme is strictly about the sixties…. The strength of Miss Hansberry was in her remarkable ability to write strong theatrical scenes. There are three or four scenes here that in themselves represent some of the best Broadway writing of the last few years.

I confess to have been more impressed by Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs … than I expected to be; more, indeed, than most of the professional theatre-tasters. At a time when rave reviews are reserved for plays like Sleuth and Conduct Unbecoming, I am tempted to speak of Les Blancs in superlatives. I suspect, too, that resistance to the play on the ground of its simplistic argument is a rationalization for social embarrassment. Les Blancs is not propaganda, as has been inferred; it is a forcefu...

So much has happened in Africa since 1961 [when Lorraine Hansberry began the writing of "Les Blancs"] that the play, laid in a Schweitzer-like medical mission in some vast equatorial country plagued by white colonial rule and black terrorism, has an air of being far less current than it claims to be …, and this datedness is reflected in its doggedly didactic tone; we are being lectured to and made to see things in the light that Teacher wishes us to see them in and not otherwise. When, ...