A Raisin in the Sun is a classic play by Lorraine Hansberry that explores themes of dreams, family, and racial identity in mid-20th century America. The narrative follows the Younger family as they navigate financial struggles and aspirations for a better life. This edition provides insight into the characters’ conflicts and societal challenges, making it a significant work in American theater.
ACT I
SCENE ONE
The YOUNGER living room would be a comfortable and well-ordered room if
it were not for a number of indestructible contradictions to this state of
being. Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and their primary
feature now is that they have clearly had to accommodate the living of too
many people for too many years—and they are tired. Still, we can see that
at some time, a time probably no longer remembered by the family (except
perhaps for MAMA), the furnishings of this room were actually selected
with care and love and even hope—and brought to this apartment and
arranged with taste and pride.
That was a long time ago. Now the once loved pattern of the couch
upholstery has to fight to show itself from under acres of crocheted doilies
and couch covers which have themselves finally come to be more
important than the upholstery. And here a table or a chair has been moved
to disguise the worn places in the carpet; but the carpet has fought back by
showing its weariness, with depressing uniformity, elsewhere on its surface.
Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished,
washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself
have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room.
Moreover, a section of this room, for it is not really a room unto itself,
though the landlord’s lease would make it seem so, slopes backward to
provide a small kitchen area, where the family prepares the meals that are
eaten in the living room proper, which must also serve as dining room. The
single window that has been provided for these “two” rooms is located in
this kitchen area. The sole natural light the family may enjoy in the course
of a day is only that which fights its way through this little window.
At left, a door leads to a bedroom which is shared by MAMA and her
daughter, BENEATHA. At right, opposite, is a second room (which in the
beginning of the life of this apartment was probably a breakfast room)
which serves as a bedroom for WALTER and his wife, RUTH.
Time: Sometime between World War II and the present.
Place: Chicago’s Southside.
At Rise: It is morning dark in the living room, TRAVIS is asleep on the
make-down bed at center. An alarm clock sounds from within the bedroom
at right, and presently RUTH enters from that room and closes the door
behind her. She crosses sleepily toward the window. As she passes her
sleeping son she reaches down and shakes him a little. At the window she
raises the shade and a dusky Southside morning light comes in feebly. She
fills a pot with water and puts it on to boil. She calls to the boy, between
yawns, in a slightly muffled voice.
RUTH is about thirty. We can see that she was a pretty girl, even
exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she
expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face. In a
few years, before thirty-five even, she will be known among her people as a
“settled woman.”
She crosses to her son and gives him a good, final, rousing shake.
RUTH Come on now, boy, it’s seven thirty! (Her son sits up at last, in
a stupor of sleepiness) I say hurry up, Travis! You ain’t the only
person in the world got to use a bathroom! (The child, a sturdy,
handsome little boy of ten or eleven, drags himself out of the bed and
almost blindly takes his towels and “today’s clothes” from drawers
and a closet and goes out to the bathroom, which is in an outside hall
and which is shared by another family or families on the same floor,
RUTH crosses to the bedroom door at right and opens it and calls in to
her husband) Walter Lee! … It’s after seven thirty! Lemme see you
do some waking up in there now! (She waits) You better get up
from there, man! It’s after seven thirty I tell you. (She waits again)
All right, you just go ahead and lay there and next thing you
know Travis be finished and Mr. Johnson’ll be in there and you’ll
be fussing and cussing round here like a madman! And be late
too! (She waits, at the end of patience) Walter Lee—it’s time for
you to GET UP!
(She waits another second and then starts to go into the bedroom,
but is apparently satisfied that her husband has begun to get up.
She stops, pulls the door to, and returns to the kitchen area. She
wipes her face with a moist cloth and runs her fingers through her
sleep-disheveled hair in a vain effort and ties an apron around her
housecoat. The bedroom door at right opens and her husband
stands in the doorway in his pajamas, which are rumpled and
mismated. He is a lean, intense young man in his middle thirties,
inclined to quick nervous movements and erratic speech habits—
and always in his voice there is a quality of indictment)
WALTER Is he out yet?
RUTH What you mean out? He ain’t hardly got in there good yet.
WALTER (Wandering in, still more oriented to sleep than to a new day)
Well, what was you doing all that yelling for if I can’t even get in
there yet? (Stopping and thinking) Check coming today?
RUTH They said Saturday and this is just Friday and I hopes to God
you ain’t going to get up here first thing this morning and start
talking to me ’bout no money—’cause I ’bout don’t want to hear
it.
WALTER Something the matter with you this morning?
RUTH No—I’m just sleepy as the devil. What kind of eggs you want?
WALTER Not scrambled, (RUTH starts to scramble eggs) Paper come?
(RUTH points impatiently to the rolled up Tribune on the table, and he
gets it and spreads it out and vaguely reads the front page) Set off
another bomb yesterday.
RUTH (Maximum indifference) Did they?
WALTER (Looking up) What’s the matter with you?
RUTH Ain’t nothing the matter with me. And don’t keep asking me
that this morning.
WALTER Ain’t nobody bothering you. (Reading the news of the day
absently again) Say Colonel McCormick is sick.
RUTH (Affecting tea-party interest) Is he now? Poor thing.
End of Document
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