Her time in the Sun

As Clair Huxtable, Phylicia Rashad was the poster woman for Reagan-era family feminism; this week she returns to the small screen as a different kind of matriarch, Mama in the latest teleadaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. Meanwhile, she’s busy rehearsing a Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and she just finished a run of Cymbeline at Lincoln Center. Yes, it seems Rashad has come unstuck in time.

“I guess maybe I am drawn [to classics],” Rashad says from New York. Raisin certainly qualifies: The 1959 play, set on the South Side and based on playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s experiences, was groundbreaking when it debuted on Broadway, and was turned into a 1961 movie starring Sidney Poitier. It’s been revived and adapted frequently since then (including another TV version in 1989), but the 2004 Broadway revival starring Sean Combs as the conflicted Walter Lee pushed Raisin back into pop consciousness. It also earned Rashad and Audra McDonald Tony Awards, and Sanaa Lathan a Tony nomination. That cast reunites for this well-acted if imperfect version.

Despite the play’s reputation, Rashad wasn’t immediately drawn to the story when director Kenny Leon approached her for the Broadway run. “I didn’t understand why we were doing it again,” she says, but on Leon’s suggestion she dove back into the text. “And I saw what he was seeing, which I had never seen before”: the “love stories” within the family. But even after getting more into the story, she still had reservations.

“It’s a language-driven play,” Rashad explains. She says Hansberry patterned the play after both Sean O’Casey’s work and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, “something people used to study and perform a lot in drama classes—I don’t think it happens anymore,” Rashad says. “Sometimes I felt [Hansberry’s] language was a little heavy-handed. But when we were performing it onstage, and we understood the intention, it didn’t seem so heavy.”

Heavy-handed language is definitely not a problem in this adaptation, which suffers from slow editing, a cloying soundtrack and overproduction; in other words, pretty much all the elements that would turn a stage play into a TV movie come up short. Surprisingly, Raisin doesn’t feel out of touch with contemporary American culture.

Rashad says Raisin is “timeless”—the story of a family trying to figure out how to spend their father’s life-insurance check certainly feels current. Mom Lena wants to buy a house, away from the ghetto where the Younger family shares a tiny apartment. Son Walter Lee wants to open a liquor store, while daughter Beneatha wants to pay for medical school. But, as in life, the money’s not just about the money. According to Rashad, Raisin asks us, and its characters, “What’s important in life? What is your duty to yourself, to your ancestors?”

It’s something on the mind of her castmates, too. “Sean said [at an event], ‘Today in New Orleans, someone is waiting for a $10,000 check.’ It’s probably more in keeping with the times of today than when it was written,” Rashad says. And it’s true that little dates the story, which is especially distressing when you realize Raisin was written five years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

This broadcast of Raisin also accounts for some of the highest-profile parts for black women on network television—look around, there’s not much else—but Rashad says the paucity of roles never crosses her mind.

“I’m working all the time,” she says. “That was being asked in the ’60s, in the ’50s. [Where are the roles for black women?] is asked in every decade. It’s not a new question…. It might have a lot to do with a number of things, one of which is the way I think. Your thoughts determine your experience.”

So what is she thinking about? “I think about working, and I don’t think about asking old questions.” How timely.

Raisin sees the light Monday 25, 7pm on ABC.