Tag Archives: Kenny Leon

A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) and Ruth (Sophie Okonedo) are just trying to survive day to day in stellar revival of A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Ethel Barrymore Theatre
243 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 15, $67 – $149
www.raisinbroadway.com

Broadway revivals are often about star power, still-relevant socioeconomic or –political issues, or inventive staging of a familiar classic. But Kenny Leon’s new version of A Raisin in the Sun goes back to the very creation of this fifty-five-year-old American drama, celebrating its fascinating author, Lorraine Hansberry. As patrons enter the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, an interview with Hansberry, the first African American woman to have a work produced on Broadway, is being broadcast on the sound system. Each Playbill comes with an additional pamphlet that reprints “Sweet Lorraine,” James Baldwin’s 1969 Esquire remembrance of Hansberry — who died in 1965 at the age of thirty-four — in which he writes, “Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them. But, in Raisin, black people recognized that house and all the people in it — the mother, the son, the daughter, and the daughter-in-law — and supplied the play with an interpretative element which could not be present in the minds of white people: a kind of claustrophobic terror, created not only by their knowledge of the streets.” Leon’s production, and the extremely talented cast, honors every word of the play, which doesn’t feel old-fashioned in any way.

Walter Lee Younger (Denzel Washington) explains his questionable plans to his mother (LaTanya Richardson Jackson) in A RAISIN IN THE SUN (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Oscar and Tony winner Denzel Washington stars as Walter Lee Younger, a dreamer trying to lift his family out of poverty in their cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Every morning there’s a battle to get to the bathroom across the hall, shared by everyone on the floor. Walter’s mother, Lena (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), is expecting a $10,000 insurance check for her recently deceased husband. While Walter wants to invest it in a liquor store with his friends Bobo (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and the never-seen Willy Harris, Walter’s hardworking wife, Ruth (Sophie Okonedo), wants to put it to far more practical use. Also awaiting the money are Walter and Ruth’s son, Travis (Bryce Clyde Jenkins), who sleeps on the couch, and Walter’s sister, Beneatha (Anika Noni Rose), who lives with them as well and wants to become a doctor. As Beneatha spends time with two different men, the assimilating George Murchison (Jason Dirden) and Joseph Asagai (Sean Patrick Thomas), who introduces her to her African roots, Lena considers moving the family to all-white Clybourne Park, leading to a visit by neighborhood leader Karl Lindner (David Cromer), setting in motion a series of events that, with a delicate balance of humor and tragedy, intelligently capture the black experience in mid-twentieth-century America. (A Raisin in the Sun was a direct influence on Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park.)

A representative from Clybourne Park (Karl Lindner) has some surprising news for the Younger family (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Washington (Fences, Julius Caesar), in a role created by Sidney Poitier first onstage and then in the 1961 film, is a whirlwind as Walter, practically dancing as he weaves his way through Mark Thompson’s apartment set, his gait displaying a slight jump, his leg often shaking in anticipation of making things better for him and his family. Okonedo embodies the sadness of the everyday drudgery her life encompasses, her eyes tired before their time, heavy with what could have been. Jackson is a fireball as the caring matriarch who wants to see her children and grandson succeed. Hansberry’s words flow like poetry as the Youngers’ path is continually blocked, evoking the Langston Hughes poem that gave the work its title, “A Dream Deferred”: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore — / And then run?” It was only ten years ago that Leon brought A Raisin in the Sun to the Royale, with a cast that included Sean Combs, Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, and Sanaa Lathan, but this stellar current production makes the previous one but a distant memory, injecting fresh new life into one of Broadway’s most historically and socially important works.

STICK FLY

The LeVay clan has gathered for what will become a very stormy weekend on Martha’s Vineyard in STICK FLY

Cort Theatre
138 West 48th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Through February 28, $35 – $131.50
www.stickflybroadway.com

Race and class collide in both familiar and unique ways in Lydia R. Diamond’s emotionally charged dysfunctional family drama, Stick Fly. The LeVays are gathering for their annual weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, but things are a little different this year. Younger son Kent (Psych’s Dulé Hill) is bringing his fiancée, Taylor (Cold Case’s Tracie Thoms), the daughter of a prestigious and respected cultural intellectual, to meet the clan, and eldest son Flip (Mekhi Phifer in his Broadway debut) will be introducing his new girlfriend, Kimber (Rosie Benton), a well-off white woman who works with troubled inner-city youth. Meanwhile, stubborn patriarch Joe (Tony and Obie winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson), a prominent neurosurgeon, has arrived without his wife, claiming she will be coming later. In addition, the LeVays’ longtime maid, Miss Ellie, is seriously ill and has sent her daughter, Cheryl (Ruined’s Condola Rashad), to take care of everyone in her stead. Joe is clearly proud of Flip, a successful plastic surgeon, but he is disappointed in Kent, whom Taylor, an entomologist, calls Spoon and Joe considers a failed ne’er-do-well even when he tells everyone that his first novel is going to be published by a major house. As Taylor and Kimber do battle over the rich and the poor, the self-centered Flip tries to hide a previous dalliance with Taylor. But in the middle of it all is Cheryl, an intelligent, prideful young woman who understands a lot more than she lets on but is about to get the shock of her life.

Joe LeVay (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) discusses insects and more with Taylor (Tracie Thoms) in insightful new Broadway drama

Produced and composed by Alicia Keys and directed by Kenny Leon, who is also currently helming Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in The Mountaintop, Stick Fly is an involving drama with sharp dialogue, an incisive sense of humor, and a solid cast. Detroit native Diamond, a Steppenwolf veteran making her Broadway debut, has written a compelling tale that flirts with clichés but usually manages to skirt just around them. David Gallo’s inventive set features a carefully sliced wall that allows the kitchen to be seen through the living room, cutting through works of art (by the likes of Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat) in a way that echoes the cross-cultural arguments that continue among the characters. Rashad, the daughter of actress Phyllis Rashad and former NFL wide receiver and broadcaster Ahmad Rashad, is particularly effective as Cheryl, who sees through a lot of the LeVay facade as she goes about her menial duties, being treated differently by everyone in the house, a dramatic device that helps to define the inherent biases in each of the characters. “Racism, discrimination, whatever,” Kimber says at one point. “You can’t imply that it exists. It’s like we’re supposed to have come so far that it’s taboo to suggest we have any further to go.” Stick Fly offers a fascinating counterpart to Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, which is currently running at the Booth Theatre. While the former tells the story of a Huxtable-like wealthy black family meeting on the Vineyard, the latter focuses on a rich white family gathering together in Palm Springs, each group dealing with long-simmering insecurities, a book written by one of the adult children, and a not necessarily well-hidden (to the audience) secret that explodes in the second act. But each play handles their situations differently, especially at the very end. Seen together, they offer intriguing insight into the state of the American family, and perhaps not coincidentally they are two of the best plays on Broadway right now.

ANATOMY OF A BREAKOUT

Sameul L. Jackson will take part in special Drama Desk panel discussion on such recent Broadway breakouts as THE MOUNTAINTOP

Fordham Mainstage at Lincoln Center
Pope Auditorium
113 West 60th St. at Columbus Ave.
Sunday, November 13, $15-$20, 6:30
www.dramadesk.org

The Drama Desk and the Fordham University Theatre Program are teaming up November 13 to present a special panel discussion, “Anatomy of a Breakout,” that examines just what it takes for a play, as well as an individual performance, to break through and become a critical and/or popular success. Editor and critic Randy Gener and Drama Desk vice president Leslie (Hoban) Blake will moderate an illustrious panel that features book writer Douglas Carter Beane, composer/lyricist Lewis Flinn, choreographer/director Dan Knechtges, and actress Liz Mikel of Lysistrata Jones; playwright David Henry Hwang, director Leigh Silverman, and actress Jennifer Lim of Chinglish; Venus in Fur playwright David Ives; actor Samuel L. Jackson of The Mountaintop; and Stick Fly and The Mountaintop director Kenny Leon. Tickets are $15 for Drama Desk members (which includes us) and their guests and $20 for the general public with advanceRSVP. The discussion will take place in front of the backdrop being used for Matthew Maguire’s production of Pierre Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro for the Fordham University Theatre Company, which continues November 11 and 17-19.