She was simply trying to shape an incident in her life into convincing theater. Her family had moved into an all-white Chicago neighborhood, where they experienced the expected difficulties. But for the play, she chose to focus on the tensions that arose within the family before they took a deep breath and made the move.
In the current Trinity Repertory Company production (through March 8), troupe veteran Barbara Meek is the mother of the extended family, who has to decide what to do with insurance money that is coming from the death of her husband. Does it go to a smart and capable daughter so she can go to medical school, or to a son, beaten down but still ambitious, who dreams of escaping his fate as a poor black man by investing in a liquor store. Joe Wilson Jr. plays the character Walter Lee Younger.
Before a recent rehearsal, Wilson and Meek sat down in the upstairs lobby to discuss the production.
Meek first performed in the play as a teenager in a Detroit theater company, in the early '60s when its reputation was new. "I played Ruth, the wife, so I got to scramble eggs on the stage," she says with a smile. "We never did black plays in my little circle of actors, so when one came along that was good, we grabbed it."
A Raisin In the Sun was one of Wilson's first professional plays as an actor, in St. Paul, and he later directed a semi-professional production in Rochester.
"I hadn't picked it up again until it was mentioned as a possibility for this season," he says. "Once I read it again, I knew it was something I wanted to tackle. It made me a little nervous, which was why I needed to tackle it. It's a remarkable play."
Nervous? Why?
"Because it's classic, it's iconic," he says. "And there is always comparison. Everyone from Sidney [Poitier] to P. Diddy has taken him on. And whatever your opinions about their performances were, it's the kind of role that every actor — and particularly an actor of color — would dream to tackle. And you don't want to screw it up."
Yet this play is a half-century old, after all. Because of the recent milestone in African-American history, couldn't it come across as dated today?
Meek speaks to that notion. "Some of the things can be anachronistic — gestures that they didn't do then, that you didn't talk to your mother in a certain way then, those kind of things."
However, she adds, "Everybody should be moved by this piece. Every group wants to have their children have a better life than they do, and have dreams that their parents didn't have. That's so human."
Wilson reminds us that the Trinity process and what he calls their "training aesthetic" both involve looking at every prospective play and saying: "Why now?" Director Brian McEleney, a longtime Trinity actor, is certainly good at asking such questions.
Wilson says: "What makes this play for me so beautiful is that she writes a play where you see people who have hope. That doesn't mean the work is done. She's not trying to tie this thing up in a nice, neat bow. We're all hopeful, but yet there is a lot of work to be done."
