Bob Newhart, immortalized in bronze since 2004 here, will be getting a new neighbor later this month when a statue of Lorraine Hansberry moves to that hyperactive playground called Navy Pier.
The new sculpture has a name, “To Sit a While,” which comes from dialogue spoken in Hansberry’s famous play “A Raisin in the Sun.” It is, fully, “Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.”
Lovely advice and to assist those who might take it, the life-sized statue of Hansberry is surrounded by five bronze objects on which you can sit, sort of chairs of varying shapes.
They are meant to represent different facets of Hansberry’s life and work, all the creation of Alison Saar and a gift from the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, an advocacy organization that promotes gender and racial parity in American theater.
That’s a good cause and, since it’s estimated that some 8 million people visit the Pier every year, it’s a fine way to introduce Hansberry to many and compel some to further explore her life.
A shock will come to those when learning that she died at 34. But she packed a great deal into those years, beginning with her birth at Provident Hospital on May 19, 1930, the youngest of Nannie and Carl Hansberry’s four children.
Her father was the founder of Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for Black people in Chicago, and also ran a successful real estate business. He was a prominent figure and his home was visited by many prominent Black social and political leaders such as poet Langston Hughes, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens.
Nevertheless, and despite the family’s prominence, the Hansberrys were subjected to segregation, threats and violence. That would deeply affect Lorraine’s later work and worldview as she graduated from Englewood High School, spent a little while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied painting in Mexico, and moved to New York in 1950 and started to write. She contributed to progressive publications, coming into a literary and politically active crowd of writers and intellectuals. She soon met Jewish writer Robert Nemiroff and they wed on June 20, 1953, at her parents’ home here.
Then came “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a working-class Black family on the South Side of Chicago coping with the death of its patriarch. Dealing with matters of dignity and dreams in the shadow of prejudice, it opened on Broadway March 11, 1959, starring Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier, and was a sensation.
It was the first play by a Black woman on Broadway, was nominated for four Tony Awards (including best play), and, as the New York Times would assert decades later, it “changed American theater forever.”
“A Raisin in the Sun” was the first play by a Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, and a film version hit theaters in 1961. Her second play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” opened to lukewarm reviews on Broadway and ran for only 101 performances. It closed Jan. 10, 1965, just days before Hansberry died of cancer.
So, the sculpture is currently on the road, on a national tour with stops in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and several historically Black colleges and universities.
There are some embellishing events and programs before Hansberry arrives with a formal presentation on Aug. 23 at 5:45 p.m. in the Polk Bros Park at the pier’s western edge. There will be remarks from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, the artist Alison Saar and some others. There will also be writer, playwright and poet Mahogany L. Browne and an outdoor screening of “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Hansberry has been honored here in the past. She and her play were the “One Book, One Chicago” selection in 2003. And in 2010 she, along with Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel and Saul Bellow, was a member of the inaugural group of inductees into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Eager for more?
You can find a satisfying portrait in “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” by Imani Perry, a Princeton University professor of African American studies. Alice Walker, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Color Purple,” said about it, “Lorraine Hansberry was so dear, so gifted, so Black, so singular in so many ways, that to miss the story of her life is to miss a huge part of ours. She left us way too soon, and yet the gift of her presence, so briefly among us, is still felt in the art she left behind. But not only in the art, but in the life. A life at last made comprehensible by this loving, attentive, thoughtful book.”
Or what about listening to Hansberry interviewed by Studs Terkel in 1959? It’s fascinating, intimate and starts with Terkel introducing “…Lorraine Hansberry, whom we can rightfully describe as a distinguished young American playwright. This may sound like a strange thing to say. An artist has written one play and we call her a distinguished American playwright. But it isn’t one man’s opinion.”
No, it wasn’t then. Isn’t now.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
