City Theatre Austin is proud to present the unforgettable production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Lisa Jordan. Called “a milestone in American theatre,” this presentation marks the 67th anniversary of the show’s groundbreaking Broadway opening and is part of the 2026 Austin Juneteenth Celebration.

 

Recent widow Lena Younger wants to use her husband's insurance money to buy a home for her family, freeing them from the cramped tenement in which they live. Her son, Walter Lee is determined to invest the money in a business - an opportunity for him to be his own man. Lena refuses: in her eyes a house is a sturdy thing to build a dream on. But when a white representative of the neighborhood "welcoming committee" presents them with an offer to buy them out of their home, the dream quickly becomes a nightmare. The Younger family attempts to find their place amidst a number of difficult situations and, for the first time, Walter begins to value what money can’t buy and achieves a new level of self-respect and pride.

 

For A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry drew from an incident in her own childhood that profoundly affected her family’s life. In defiance of real estate contracts of that era that barred Blacks from certain neighborhoods, her father moved his family to an all-white area. Mobs gathered outside the new home, and 8-year-old Lorraine was almost struck by a brick hurled through a window. The family was finally evicted but Carl Hansberry and NAACP lawyers fought the state court decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, ultimately winning a landmark decision prohibiting restrictive housing.

 

Hansberry would later write, “It will help a lot of people understand that we have among our downtrodden ranks people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what – after all the laughter and the tears – the play is supposed to say.” A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, lauded by The New York Times as a show that “changed American theater forever.” For the first time in history, a production hailed a Black principal cast, a Black director, and a Black playwright. Its 29-year-old author became the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Best Play of the Year citation. The original film starred Sidney Poitier with a more recent Broadway and film version starring Phylicia Rashad and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. A Raisin in the Sun brings to life an inspiring classic story about a working class Black family struggling to make it in America.