On this day in New York · March 11, 1959
A Raisin in the Sun Opens on Broadway
A 28-year-old playwright put a Black family's fight over a $10,000 insurance check on a Broadway stage, and the color line behind the curtain broke along with the one in front of it.
The facts
- Opening night
- March 11, 1959, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
- Director
- Lloyd Richards, the first Black director on Broadway
- Lead cast
- Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands
- Run
- 530 total performances, transferring to the Belasco Theatre that October
On March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, the first play by a Black woman ever produced on Broadway. Hansberry was 28, and the production also marked the first time a Black director, Lloyd Richards, staged a show on Broadway. Sidney Poitier led the cast as Walter Lee Younger, opposite Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, and Diana Sands, in a story about a working-class Black family on Chicago's South Side deciding what to do with a $10,000 life insurance payout after the death of the father. The play ran 530 performances between the Barrymore and the Belasco Theatre, and later that year it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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changed American theater forever
Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, 1983
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
It broke Broadway's color line on both sides of the curtain, writer and director alike, and put a Black family's ordinary struggles at the center of the American stage instead of its margins.
Sources
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