Theater News

Actors in the Sun

Barbara & Scott share their thoughts on two family dramas that have much in common: A Raisin in the Sun and Roar.

Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathanin A Raisin in the Sun(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathan
in A Raisin in the Sun
(Photo © Joan Marcus)

Phylicia Rashad never struck us as a world class actress; she appeared to get work largely on the basis of her TV sitcom fame rather than her talent. The news that she would be starring in the pivotal role of Lena Younger in the Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun did not set our hearts aflutter, and when we read that novice actor Sean Combs would play the role of her son, we wondered how far the producers would go to bring in an audience at the expense of the play. Only the knowledge that Audra MacDonald would be in the cast kept our hopes from being entirely dashed. But the reason we go to the theater, rather than just speculate about it, is to see for ourselves what’s on stage. And what we saw was more than surprising: It was inspiring.

To begin, Phylicia Rashad is giving the performance of her career in this show. As the matriarchal head of the Younger family, she displays every color in the emotional rainbow. Convincingly strong-willed, she can just as readily turn softhearted and sentimental. The beauty of her performance is that she grounds her character ever so firmly in reality. Once she establishes those roots, as long as she stays honest — which she does — she can do or say anything and never lose our allegiance.

Sean Combs may be the weakest actor in the cast but that’s only because everyone else is so damned good. He’s actually rather well suited to the role of Walter Lee Younger, the not-so-bright underachiever who desperately wants to prove his worth. In fact, he’s so well cast that you have to wonder why his wife Ruth (Audra MacDonald) ever married him in the first place; it certainly seems that she could have done better. Still, she married into a fine family that includes her upwardly mobile sister-in-law Beneatha (Sanaa Lathan). Both MacDonald and Lathan give vivid, fully defined performances.

The smaller roles of Beneatha’s suitors are sharply etched by Teagle F. Bougere and Frank Harts; Bougere’s free-thinking exchange student from Nigeria is particularly enjoyable. Wonderfully oily but with just the right touch of guilty self-awareness is David Aaron Baker as a “welcoming” representative of the white community into which the Younger family is planning to move. In sum, a powerful cast has been put together for this fine production of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play.

Hansberry was a visionary playwright. She was ahead of the curve in her portrayal of strong, independent black women, not to mention her depiction of the difficult process of racial integration and the emergence of the Pan African movement. Most important of all, she was an exquisite, passionate writer who knew how to create vivid characters and craft a powerful story. When all is said and done, two tragedies mark this play. The first is that, in the 45 years since it was first produced, too many of the problems that it describes still exist; the second is that Hansberry, who wrote the play when she was just 29 years old, died in 1965 at the age of 34. A Raisin in the Sun is such a superb piece of theater that we can only imagine what its author might have accomplished had she lived longer.

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Sarita Choudhury and Sherri Eldin in Roar(Photo © Carol Rosegg)
Sarita Choudhury and Sherri Eldin in Roar
(Photo © Carol Rosegg)

A Mighty Roar

Another family drama, this one a contemporary tale titled Roar, recently opened Off-Broadway courtesy of The New Group and made an immediate impact. It deals with a family of outsiders who, like the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun, are also struggling with the concept of assimilation — but this family of uprooted Palestinians sees the world in a considerably different and far more complex way.

Writing with bite but not bitterness, Betty Shamieh has created a family torn between the desire to make it in America and the urge to flee this foreign land for home in the Middle East. In the character of the driven mother Karema (Sarita Choudhury), one can see the same sort of pride exhibited by Lena Younger. The difference, however, is that Karema’s family is wildly successful; they’re landlords who own a raft of apartment buildings as well as a thriving retail store located below their extremely modest second floor apartment. The irony is that they pretend to be impoverished: Karema’s unhappy husband Ahmed (Joseph Kamal) works as the superintendent of their buildings, fixing toilets and never letting on that he’s the owner for fear that no one will rent from a Palestinian.

Returning from the Middle East under mysterious circumstances is Karema’s beautiful and exotic sister Hala (Annabella Sciorra). She moves in with Karema, Ahmed, and their teenage daughter Irene (Sherri Eldin). All hell breaks loose as thwarted ambitions and emotions come to the surface in an explosion of betrayals.

Choudhury gives a dark and brooding performance that pulls you into Karema’s relentless ambition. She may at first seem too hell-bent on success but she wins us over when she secretly offers a fortune to underwrite a record contract for Irene in order to salve her daughter’s misery at being rejected. (This is the sort of mother we’d all like to have!) Unfortunately, Eldin as Irene is shrill without the underlying sensitivity that would make her youthful braying acceptable. Kamal is winning as the husband who wants out, delivering a fine-tuned performance that captures Ahmed’s mixed emotions. In a small role, much spoken of but only brought to life with his appearance very late in the play, Daniel Oreskes is everything that his character has been built up to be. Finally, Sciorra is absolutely dazzling as Hala. Sexy, smart, and intriguingly flawed, the character is a wonderful creation and Sciorra illuminates her from within.

Although it deals largely with the Palestinian experience, Roar is fundamentally about the American dream. The production is directed by Marion McClinton, well-known for staging some of the most important African-American plays of the last decade. Another director might have focused on the political aspects of Roar but McClinton understands that the play’s punch comes from its characters’ search for a home in which they can be happy. In that way, it’s very similar to A Raisin in the Sun.

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegelentertainment@msn.com.]

Featured In This Story

Roar

Closed: May 8, 2004