New Releases by Lorraine Hansberry

Under the editorship of the late Robert Nemiroff, with a provocative and thoughtful introduction by preeminent African-American scholar Margaret B. Wilkerson and a commentary by Spike Lee, this completely restored screenplay is the accurate and authoritative edition of Lorraine Hansberry's script and a testament to her unparalled accomplishment as a Black artist. The 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun, with a screenplay by the author, Lorraine Hansberry, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival even though one-third of the actual screenplay Hansberry had written had been cut out. The film did essentially bring Hansberry's extraordinary play to the screen, but it failed to fulfill her cinematic vision. Now, with this landmark edition of Lorraine Hansberry's original script for the movie of A Raisin in the Sun that audiences never viewed, readers have at hand an epic, eloquent work capturing not only the life and dreams of a Black family, but the Chicago—and the society—that surround and shape them. Important changes in dialogue and exterior shots, a stunning shift of focus to her male protagonist, and a dramatic rewriting of the final scene show us an artist who understood and used the cinematic medium to transform a stage play into a different art form—a profound and powerful film.

This is the probing hilarious and provocative story of Sidney a disenchanted Greenwich Village intellectual his wife Iris an aspiring actress and their colorful circle of friends and relations. Set against the shenanigans of a stormy political campaign the play follows its characters in their unorthodox quests for meaningful lives in an age of corruption alienation and cynicism. With compassion humor and poignancy the author examines questions concerning the fragility of love morality and ethics interracial relationships drugs rebellion conformity and especially withdrawal from or commitment to the world.

Three plays about the struggles of black people convey the author's feelings of anger and frustration.

"Best American play of 1970, Les Blancs confronts the hope and tragedy of Africa in revolution. The setting is a white Christian mission in a colony about to explode. The time is that hour of reckoning when no one the guilty nor the innocent can evade the consequences of white colonialism and imperatives of black liberation. Tshembe Matoseh, the English educated son of a chief, has come home to bury his father. He finds his teenage brother a near alcoholic and his older brother a priest and traitor to his people. Forswearing politics and wanting only to return to his wife and child in England, Tshembe is drawn into the conflict symbolized by a woman dancer, the powerful Spirit of Africa who pursues him."--Page 4 of cover.

The story of black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Woven together from letters, diaries, notebooks and extracts from her plays by Robert Nemiroff, her husband and literary executor. Arranged chronologically but without sharp divisions between scenes. No single member of the cast plays Lorraine Hansberry - all in turn (both male and female) play her, as well as characters from her plays and the people who most affected her. Specifies three black actresses (one older), one black actor, two white actresses and one white actor. More people can be used with less doubling.