Raisin and the Rapper

Lan

dmarks in theater aren't what they used to be. Back in 1959 Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun became the first play by a black woman — amazing to think now — ever to open on Broadway. It was a breakthrough in subject matter too, focusing on the struggles of a poor black family in a Chicago tenement at the dawn of the civil rights era. The revival of A Raisin in the Sun that opened last week on Broadway is groundbreaking in a way more suited to our times. It stars a hip-hop impresario with scant acting experience, making his Broadway debut: Sean (P. Diddy) Combs.

Can he cut it? The answer is a qualified yes. As Walter Lee, a chauffeur with dreams of starting his own business, a frustrated patriarch in a house full of women, he has an easy naturalism onstage. His bantamweight body is lithe and expressive — now sullen, now cocky, now bitterly mocking — and he gives Walter a punkish charm. Where he doesn't measure up is in the big scenes. At the climactic moment when Walter realizes the money he has entrusted to a friend is irretrievably lost, Combs is too cool a customer to really register the blow. (He told his acting coach, according to a New York Times story, that he couldn't relate to the idea of getting swindled out of money.) The audience is denied an emotional catharsis; the tragedy seems stunted.

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But the damage to the play is slight because it shifts the focus to where (if it weren't for Sidney Poitier, who originated the role) it might have always been: on the women. As his wife, musical star Audra McDonald keeps her head down and her emotions in check, letting them loose in small, startling bursts. Sanaa Lathan is winning and funny as Walter's headstrong sister. Former Cosby Show star Phylicia Rashad, dumpy and nearly unrecognizable as Walter's mother, breaks through the cliches to create an unsentimental portrait of moral strength in the midst of squalor. But nearly every detail (from the mellow jazz musical interludes to a 10-year-old boy's wince in pain as his mama pulls a comb through his hair) seems exactly right in Kenny Leon's finely wrought production.

And does A Raisin in the Sun still cut it? Its style, overflowing with characters and earnest speeches, can feel dated. So can many of its concerns: the debate in the black community over "assimilation" vs. pride in African heritage, the fear that overbearing women are "holding back" the black male, the terror facing a black family as it prepares to move into an all-white neighborhood. But it remains a tough and truthful drama that raises all the key issues without haranguing. Even P. Diddy's presence seems somehow right. He represents a generation that has made the debate between assimilation and African pride all but moot. He moved into the ultimate lily-white neighborhood — East Hampton, N.Y.--and throws the best parties around. And he's a big star who has risked critical derision to help recapture an important moment in the history of black drama. Now that's progress.