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, destroyed everything that is good and subtle in her work. (p. 542)

For her … human possibility was what counted…. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was primarily an attack on a particular kind of fashionable determinism, the assumption that nothing can be done about the evils of the world and the resulting "great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men," as one of the characters puts it.

Despite her need to say something...