Feminist Criticism

In a review for Ms. (December 1973), the poet Yvonne contrasted the musical Raisin with Lorraine Hansberry's original play, in which theThree Younger women formed the most complex, thoroughly honest portrait of the archetypal black woman to have appeared on the American stage…. The spine of Hansberry's original plot was provocative and clear-cut. It was the conflict between life and the profit motive, a conflict in which a black man, Walter Lee Younger (Mama's son, Ruth's husband, Beneatha's brother), having chosen money as his god, becomes his family's moral antagonist. In the new musical, the dramatic focus is switched from the women to the man. The total production—script, music, lyrics, direction, choreography, sets—is created by everybody but the black woman. The women's most intense speeches are cut, their stage movements made awkward and their personalities made shallow or reversed. Many of their lines and dramatic gestures, particularly those showing warmth and depth, are given to Walter to make him a less vindictive and more likeable character.