Masters of yesterday like August Wilson and Ron Milner, as well as new classicists like Lydia Diamond and Pearl Cleage, exploit theatre in its most traditional forms to give the black family home and the love within it credit as all an audience needs. Yet so much more of it also quiets that theme, to make the stage exist primarily for the characters’ humanity. Since then, black theatre-like most of black cultural Americana-has continued to include the ongoing African-American experience of its oppressive caste as a central theme. The fact she was a black woman doing so with a black family proved to be a turning point in commercial success for a flood black playwrights and actors, when the more palatable concerns of family drew larger diverse audiences than politically-charged or “white-shaming” productions had been able to do. Similar to Arthur Miller’s and Eugene O’Neil’s and Tennessee Williams’ offerings, Hansberry illuminated the family homestead as perhaps the most powerful ground upon which to examine human nature and genius. Marc Rogers and George Stalling in Sins of the Father(all images courtesy of eta Creative Arts)īlack theatre broke through in America when Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal 1959 masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun isolated the Negro narrative inside the domestic space, dislocated our relationship to white America in favor of concentration on our relationships to each other, and elevated ordinary people in a black family as characters worthy of epic focus.

Sins of the father tv one