Kierra Bunch, Brian Keys, and Martasia Jones Photo by Michael Brosilow

Andrew Boyce's scenic design lays the foundation for Randle-Bent's nuanced vision for the play. There is no proscenium or thrust. Rather, Boyce builds the main floor of the Youngers' kitchenette apartment a yard or so above the theater floor, leaving the area around its irregular base almost entirely visible in snippets from different parts of the audience. This is paired with black-and-white blown-up images of Chicago's South Side in the 1950s.

Only one of the two bedrooms has a door, just off the microscopic kitchen, and this set is fully dressed and open on the other three sides. Similarly, the second bedroom, separated from the living room by only a flowered curtain, is also open and visible to segments of the audience. The result is that even as dramas are unfolding among various groupings of the family in the apartment itself, we can see Mrs. Johnson scuffing back and forth to the shared bathroom along a back hallway or Walter Lee wandering the street below, as well as the actions of characters who have retreated "offstage" to change, rest, and so on. The overall result is claustrophobic while conveying the critical lack of privacy.

And yet, the design takes care to ensure that the apartment is pleasant and homey. Young Travis must sleep on the couch and the family members must constantly make and unmake his bed, but he sleeps under a lovely quilt. Beneatha and Lena must share an overcrowded room with no closet, but the curtain that separates it from the rest of the living space is a bold, pretty floral pattern.

Willow James's subtle, impeccably executed sound design, where ambient and diabetic music bleed into one another, and Maximo Gano De Oro's similarly precise and effect lighting work with the set design and dressing to declare, emphatically, that there is joy and life and humor in the space, as Hansberry just as emphatically intended.

Raquel Adorno's costumes add another layer to this solid foundation. Lena and Ruth both sport neat, respectable shirtwaists throughout, yet Lena's head wrap and, later, the wig she dons for company convey the distance between what these women need to be and want to be. Walter Lee's performative suspenders-and-tie work wear similarly contrasts with the casual flair of the knit shirts he wears around the house and down at the Green Hat with Bobo and Willie. And most significantly and successfully, Adorno's vision of possible futures for individuals and the Younger family, in general, are wonderfully rendered in how she outfits both Beneatha and Travis, who serve as imaginative, compressed timelines of hope and striving.

Randle-Bent's direction blooms from the staging and finds expression in a cast that is unafraid to play the depths of the family's pain and conflict, but also find its humor, joy, and solidarity with ease. This begins with Shanésia Davis as Lena Younger. Davis conveys the weight of gender and generation with grace and humor. In particular, her work with Kierra Bunch as Ruth unearths the very best of Hansberry's brilliance. The conflicts between these women and the way they support and lift each other up still feel regrettably revolutionary and aspirational sixty years on from Hansberry's death.

Bunch, in turn, forges vivid, fractious, loving relationships with both Brian Keys (Walter Lee) and Martasia Jones (Beneatha). There is nothing simple, let alone simplistic, in the way these characters interact, and although Hansberry's words are certainly the root of everything good here, it is these actors who ensure that it blooms before our eyes. Keys and Jones clash and it enriches our understanding of both gender and generation. Davis and Bunch, in their quiet, domestic, and intimate moments, afford us insight into what it is like to struggle in one's identity as a woman, only to find that the ground shifts constantly under their feet.

Jones also does wonderful work opposite Beneatha's two suitors: the prosperous, dismissive George Murchison (wonderfully rendered by Charles Andre Gardner), who values her as educated (but not too educated) arm candy; and Asagai (Eliott Johnson), who is content to dream of a radically different, self-determined future, even if it is one as precarious as the oppressive past.

In the supporting cast, Vincent Teninty provides just the right touch of shock value as the lone white face in the east, Karl Linder, the achingly polite representative of the white neighborhood association sent to scare the Youngers away from they new home. As Bobo, Walter Lee's hapless would-be business partner, Julian Parker provides a devastating glimpse of the way the world, as crafted and maintained by brutal, oppressive history, punishes Black men, in particular for daring to dream.

In a similar vein, as Mrs. Johnson, J. Nicole Brooks conjures up a character who is far more than good for a laugh. Without ever veering into one-dimensional villainy, Brooks explores a mindset that transcends the individual and leads entire groups of people to participate in their own oppression, even as they understandably seek satisfaction in what they, themselves, have been able to eke out.

A Raisin in the Sun has been extended through March 9, 2025, at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit www.CourtTheatre.org or call 773-753-4472.