Best Selling Books by Lorraine Hansberry

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.

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.

"A three-act play concerned with the tensions in a middle-class African American family living on Chicago''s Southside in the 1950s." "Hansberry''s drama focuses on the Youngers, a 1950s African-American working-class family in Chicago striving to realize their individual drams of prosperity and education, and their collective dream of a better life. It was the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway." Reader''s Ency. 4th edition.