Young, gifted and black

By Tom Gardner

From Martin Luther King to Huey Newton and Malcolm X: the African-American struggle for equality has never been fought with a single voice. A new production of a near-forgotten play introduces what to many will be a new voice: the African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Her dark, lacerating and loquacious drama “Les Blancs”, which is being staged at the National Theatre in London, offers a sideways look at the tensions of the civil-rights movement. Written shortly before her death in 1965 and first performed in 1970, it is set in a fictional African colony during a bloody nationalist uprising. But it can also be read, today as in the 1960s, as a statement about what was happening back home.

Were Hansberry alive today, she might well have been a member of Black Lives Matter, the contemporary civil-rights movement notable for its female leadership and feminist thrust – a far cry from the hypermasculine Black Power of her day. She was the first African-American woman to have a play staged on Broadway, in 1959, with “A Raisin in the Sun”, a ground-breaking drama about a black family set in simmering postwar Chicago that echoed her family’s experience of informal segregation there. It prompted her friend James Baldwin, the African-American novelist and intellectual, to declare that she had managed to “put more of the truth of black people’s lives on the stage than any other playwright in the entire history of theatre.” She became the youngest winner of the New York Critics’ Play of the Year award, at the age of 29.