Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hansberry, Lorraine - Gerald Weales

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GERALD WEALES

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 Negro play, but a play in which the characters are Negroes….

Having suggested that objectivity is impossible with respect to A Raisin in the Sun, I should like to make a few objective remarks about it. The play, first of all, is old fashioned. Practically no serious playwright, in or out of America, works in such a determinedly naturalistic form as Miss Hansberry in her first play…. Raisin is the kind of play which demands the...

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1. Introduction
2. Brooks Atkinson
3. Tom F. Driver
4. Gerald Weales
5. Harold R. Isaacs
6. Stanley Kauffmann
7. John Cutts
8. Walter Kerr
9. Ossie Davis
10. Arthur France
11. C.W.E. Bigsby
12. Gerald Weales
13. Jordan Y. Miller
14. Martin Gottfried
15. Brendan Gill
16. Walter Kerr
17. Harold Clurman
18. George R. Adams
19. David E. Ness
20. Clive Barnes
21. W. Edward Farrison
22. Julius Lester
23. Bertie J. Powell
24. Copyright

1. Lorraine Hansberry