Volume CXXXIII, Number 15 February 8, 2002 f

Tribute honors life, works of Hansberry
KERRY ELSON
STAFF WRITER

Bowdoin students, faculty, and friends attended a veritable séance last Saturday night while attending the staged reading of To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Eight students slowly emerged from the dusky wings of Wish Theater to resurrect playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the creator of the play A Raisin in the Sun. As though participating in a monster game of Ouija, audience members hushed and let Hansberry's spirit pass.

Consisting of excerpts from Hansberry's diary entries, letters and plays, the show chronicled the playwright's life from her school days to the successes and failures of her work to her involvement in politics.

The play engaged both real and fictional characters, and it presented events in and out of sequence. This collage of voices and eras had the potential to be confusing, but the elimination of blocking and costume changes made the production more streamlined. The "staged reading" format allowed the audience to focus solely on the words of the playwright. Robinson says, "I really feel like [Hansberry] is in the room with us when we're [reading the script]." Hansberry's ghost is benevolent: no glass vases were smashed and no theater seats were mysteriously jostled during the performance.

Robinson first saw a production of Black at Emerson College, where he used to teach. He was attracted to the show because it had a multi-racial cast and made references to plays and music from different cultures. The show was especially fitting for a liberal arts college, such as Bowdoin, he feels, because it dealt with issues of college life and reached across boundaries. "One thing I loved about the show," Robinson says, " is that...you have a black woman playing Lorraine Hansberry and then in the next scene it's a white woman playing Lorraine Hansberry. I just loved the idea that her voice moves around through different people."

When he first arrived to teach at Bowdoin, Robinson found it difficult to assemble the multi-racial cast the play required. During the fall 2001 auditions, however, Robinson saw a number of talented actors who could fulfill the casting requirements. "I added [the show] to the season after the auditions," Robinson says, "because I said 'Oh, we've got some good people, we can do this thing.'"

Robinson hopes that the presence of Black's multi-racial cast will encourage students of all nationalities to participate in Bowdoin theater. Corona Benson, a member of the cast, also considers the reading to be a positive step in making Bowdoin theater more inclusive. She says, "It was a tremendously diverse cast. You just don't see that very often across the board at Bowdoin, but especially...in terms of the theater. The show as a whole had a very different flavor than a lot of what Bowdoin has seen."