To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words

by Lorraine Hansberry

Overview

A long-running success of the 1968/69 Off-Broadway season. Fast paced powerful touching and hilarious this kaleidoscope of constantly shifting scenes mood and images recreates the world of a great American woman and artist Lorraine Hansberry. Uniquely and boldly the play dramatically weaves through her life experiences and the times that shaped her. The actors slip ingeniously into and out of a variety of challenging roles spanning her life and experiences to the ultimate confrontation when cancer strikes her. Includes brilliantly high lighted scenes from her plays as well as letters diaries poems and personal reminiscences. A major statement of the American Black experience.

ÿÞ"An extraordinary achievement!...A whirl of probing celebrating hoping laughing despairing and moving on...so brilliantly and tenderly alive." - The New York Times

"A milestone." - Time

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780573616761
Publisher:	Concord Theatricals
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	140
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published and produced in some 30 countries, while her film adaptation was nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death, her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In 1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les Blancs, her last play—posthumously performed on Broadway and recently in prominent regional theaters—has been hailed by a number of critics as her best.

Editorial Reviews

"Suffused with the light that was Lorraine . . . one hears that inflection of voice, the exact timbre of the laugh." —James Baldwin

"An extraordinary achievement. . . . . Brilliantly alive." —The New York Times

"Inspired and inspiring. . . . A work of glowing beauty." —San Francisco Examiner

"I advise anyone who is interested in the human condition, black or white, to read it." —Newsday

From the Publisher