"A Raisin In The Sun" on ABC 02/25

I have already expressed that I feel Phylicia Rashad is one of the most underrated and under appreciated actresses of our time. Monday evening she will be appearing in a television production of "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hannesberry. The cast also features Audra MacDonald, Sanaa Lathan, Sean Combs all of whom appeared in the broadway production that garnered Tony's for Rashad and McDonald (Rashad becoming the first black woman ever to win as Lead Actress in a Drama). Check this movie out if you can. This will be my 3rd production of this play. I saw the movie with Sidney Poitier and the PBS version with Danny Glover and Ester Rolle....



Three women shine in powerful 'Raisin in the Sun'
By Matthew Gilbert
Globe Staff / February 23, 2008

On Monday night, ABC is bringing the big, rich performances of the 2004 stage revival of ‘‘A Raisin in the Sun’’ to the small screen. More accurately, ABC is bringing the big, rich performances of Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, and Sanaa Lathan through the small screen, into our homes and hearts and minds. This knockout adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play is a model of both the pure power of stage acting and TV’s potential to bring us up close to that acting without deadening it. The movie shows us every facial expression and eye flicker, and yet the camerawork, with its probing intimacy, never distracts from the story.
more stories like this.

Both Rashad and McDonald won Tony Awards for their performances in the Broadway play, and the ABC film, premiering Monday night at 8 on Channel 5, showcases exactly why. Surely they will go on to collect a few TV acting prizes when the season is over. Along with Lathan, Rashad and McDonald mightily embody the female strength and survival instinct that drive this play to great heights of inspiration. Sean ‘‘Diddy’’ Combs may be the best-known name on the marquee, and his performance is solid enough; but the women, so fully realized and emotionally evocative, are the thing.

Written by Hansberry on the eve of the 1960s civil rights movement, ‘‘A Raisin in the Sun’’ once again proves its durability as both a period piece about African- American identity and a statement for the ages. Set in 1959 Chicago, the action follows the financially struggling Younger family through a series of crises hinging on a forthcoming insurance check for $10,000. While Walter Lee (Combs) plans to gamble the money on a liquor-store venture, his widowed mother, Lena (Rashad), and his wife, Ruth (McDonald), want to buy a home in a white neighborhood. His sister, Beneatha (Lathan), hopes the windfall will pay for her medical school. The play is a wonderfully balanced work, as it reaches into social and racial issues, family dynamics, and spiritual conflict without losing its dramatic center.

Both McDonald and Lathan deliver revealing, visceral performances. As McDonald’s Ruth considers aborting her second child, with no resistance from Walter Lee, her face is twisted with grief and exhaustion. Lathan’s Beneatha is an extroverted free spirit unwilling to stop expressing her creativity, her African heritage, her joy, and her ambition. She is open-hearted and stubborn at once. She is drawn to assimilate, as a black American, and yet she snaps, ‘‘I am not an assimilationist’’ at her Nigerian boyfriend, pronouncing the word like an expletive. She embodies an internal divide.

But Rashad is as restrained as the other actresses aren’t. She pulls back from every possible chance of turning Lena into a self-consciously noble heroine. Lena is a tower of faith, but Rashad doesn’t telegraph that fact or veer into sanctimony. Lena is truly saintly: She doesn’t lose hope that her son will grow up, telling Beneatha, ‘‘There’s always something left to love.’’ She sees the good in him, even when she is disgusted with his irresponsibility and his claim that ‘‘Money is life.’’ But Rashad never makes her heroine into anything more self-consciously dramatic than an ordinary woman who has learned from life. She projects pride, but not in cloying amounts.

Combs’s presence runs the risk of prying us out of the movie, as he doesn’t quite disappear behind his portrayal of Walter Lee, as sincere as his effort may be. Combs remains undeniably Diddy. And yet that contemporary flavor adds a new currency to the play, a sense that it still has something relevant to say about black men trying to get a foothold in adulthood, trying to dream against the odds. Combs doesn’t draw every inch of the poetry from the script, nicely adapted from the play by Paris Qualles, but his sullen presence adds weight to his scenes.

Qualles and director Kenny Leon open up the play with a few external shots, but only slightly. And yet this made for TV movie, whose producers include Combs and the team of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron from ‘‘Chicago,’’ never feels claustrophobic or overly stagy. Wisely, the people behind the scenes step back and let the actors and Hansberry tell the story.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.