Description:
Actor Sidney Poitier and actress Ruby Dee, in a scene from the play A Raisin In the Sun. A Raisin in the Sun examines unfulfilled dreams, human motivation, and racial prejudice. When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, the play was a radically new representation of black life. The New York Times called the drama "A play that changed American theater forever."