Lorraine Hansberry Collection FROM THE PUBLISHER
A Raisin in the Sun is a powerful, prize-winning play, with the full cast recording featuring Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Claudia McNeil, and Diana Sands. To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a series of short vignettes, monologues, and mood pieces that feature gospel singing and related instrumental music, with superb actors, James Earl Jones and Claudia McNeil among them; the result is a thrilling and powerful listening experience. This audio also features the author discussing her work and philosophy, the theater, the black experience, and the challenge of the artist in nid-10th-century America.
About the Author:Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. Hansberry's To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, was produced Off-Broadway in 1969—after her premature death of cancer at the age of 34.
FROM THE CRITICS
Martin Luther King
Her commitment of spirit...her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Her commitment of spirit...her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.
Library Journal
This first audiobook to give the full perspective of Hansberry's short but brilliant career includes a full-cast (Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and James Earl Jones, among others) recording of A Raisin in the Sun, a dramatized reading from To Be Young, Gifted and Black (TBYGB), plus scattered interviews and speeches. The somewhat confusing TBYGB is, as explained in the print version, a montage of journal excerpts, speeches, letters, biographical accounts, and relevant fragments from plays, posthumously compiled "to relate the artist to the person." As play fragments look backward, presenting old-style blacks, the speeches and diary entries look remarkably forward. Listeners will hardly believe their ears when they hear Mike Wallace (60 Minutes) in 1959, attacking Hansberry for winning the New York Drama Critics Best Play award (overpowering plays by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Archibald MacLeish), insisting she won simply because she is black. Here, and elsewhere, the playwright defends herself and her race with poise and distinction. Cumulatively, these tapes reveal her as a skilled, often underrated visionary. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
AudioFile
This fascinating anthology is a four-tape education in the mind and art of Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965). It collects the classic 1969 Caedmon recording of Hansberry's most famous play, A RAISIN IN THE SUN (with Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis), two author interviews mostly about the play (with Mike Wallace and Studs Terkel) from 1959, the 1972 Caedmon recording of the stage self-portrait TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK (posthumously assembled from her autobiographical writings by Hansberry's ex-husband Robert Nemiroff), and five short speeches by Hansberry. These important recordings have been digitally mixed and mastered and sound fine. Harper/ Caedmon deserves praise for their thoroughness in assembling a collection so rich in literature and history. G.H. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
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