The cast of "A Raisin in the Sun": Peter Bailey (Walter Lee), Adrienne Mei Irving (Ruth Younger), Ranee Lee (Lena Younger, Mama) and Leah Doz (Beneatha Younger)
For long-time followers of Montreal's theatre milieu, a sense of déjà vu will come with the Black Theatre Workshop's 40th season. The lineup is led by A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 play about members of an African-American family struggling to find their way in an often hostile, bigoted world.
The production, which takes its bow on Wednesday night, is both a nod to cultural achievements of the African diaspora, but also to the Black Theatre Workshop itself, which staged the first Montreal production of the play in 1979.
"I thought this play works very well at both drawing attention to the achievements of blacks and at highlighting our theatre company's own history," says Tyrone Benskin, the artistic director of the BTW and director of this production.
The BTW was born out of a need for better representation of blacks in Quebec, recalls one of the founders, Clarence Bayne. In 1964, he and a group of other blacks studying and working in Montreal sat in a basement apartment, discussing and debating politics. "We asked ourselves, 'How can Caribbean people present ourselves with more pride and dignity?' We formed the Trinidad and Tobago Association of Montreal."
Over time, the group decided that it wanted to represent and appeal to a broader spectrum of black people, so the organization morphed into the BTW in 1972. "We responded to demands that the group become more inclusive of all black people," Bayne says.
Since then, the BTW has consistently staged acclaimed productions, appealing to audiences across racial lines. It is the only anglophone black professional theatre company in Quebec, and the oldest professional black theatre company in Canada.
A Raisin in the Sun has a storied, potent history all its own. When it made its debut in 1959, it was the first Broadway play ever to be written by an African-American woman, the first ever to be directed by an African-American director (Lloyd Richards), and starred a then-up-and-coming actor by the name of Sidney Poitier (as well as Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett Jr.).
The play was inspired by Hansberry's own traumatic childhood; after her parents won a landmark Supreme Court ruling against segregation laws, their family was allowed to remain in a previously lily-white Chicago suburb. But through vandalism, anonymous threats and verbal harassment, the neighbours made the Hansberrys' time there hellish. The anxiety of this experience is effectively translated into the trials and tribulations of the family in A Raisin in the Sun. The members of the family have different ideas about how they might create better opportunities for themselves and raise their social standing - everything from moving into a bigger house to investing in a liquor store.
The play would become a critically acclaimed film in 1961 (with the entire Broadway cast intact), "and that's how I first got to know the work," Benskin recalls. "The movie had a huge impact on me. I became an actor because of Sidney Poitier - I had always wanted to be an actor, but his success showed me a black person could do it." ( A Raisin in the Sun has since seen two TV productions and a Broadway musical, Raisin, which won the Best Musical Tony Award in 1973.)
Benskin says that while the play comes from a very specific moment in history, it remains a pertinent work for contemporary audiences. "Laws may have changed, but the class system remains in North America. This is a play about a good man trying to reach for his dream. In [Montreal neighbourhoods] Little Burgundy or St. Henri, you can still find characters just like this. This was the first play in which there was a black everyman, a central character everyone could relate to on some level."
He also points out that the 1979 production of the play marked a shift in the evolution of the BTW. "Until that point, the Workshop had been more of a grassroots Caribbean-based company; this widened our focus and appeal."
Benskin bristles at the suggestion that the 40th anniversary might have been better celebrated with a Canadian or local play. "This is a way of looking back at a long collective history of black literature," he argues. "This play had a huge impact on writers and artists of African descent across North America. It paved the way for many Afro-Canadian writers, who were very influenced by it."
Bayne recalls, "When we first produced the play in 1979, we hit new heights in terms of our reviews and our audience numbers. We ended up with 70 per cent of our audiences being white or other than black. It recalls the moment when we got the attention of all of Montreal."
Now 78, he says a big part of the success of the BTW lies in the very fact that it still exists. "So many theatre companies come and go. We've left a real impression, and continue to develop the voices of Afro-Canadians."
The Black Theatre Workshop's production of A Raisin in the Sun premieres on Wednesday at Montreal's Centaur Theatre and runs until Dec. 5 (514-288-3161).
Special to The Globe and Mail