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FREEDOMWAYS    FOURTH QUARTER 1971

plantation. What led her to write a play-her last play, as it turned out-about the Brusteins? And what meaning does it have for us, living in our own age of turmoil?

Certainly it was not the box office that inspired her subject. She must have been well aware of the New York theater critics' antipathy toward plays about politics. And, indeed, these critics raked Sidney Brustein over the coals thoroughly, in varying degrees of critical truth (some pointing out, justly, that the play is somewhat overwritten) and outright hostility (some indicating that they didn't give a damn in the first place about the kind of characters Lorraine Hansberry was interested in). But this leads to another surprise, and another question: for, opposed to the hostile critics who helped to kill the production, there also emerged a group of over fifty well known theater people (as well as countless sympathizers) who advertised, contributed and fought though unsuccessfully, for the show to be saved, because they believed that "If plays of such quality, humor, wisdom cannot survive in the nation's cultural center, then all of us must seriously question our future in the theater." Such a reaction is extremely rare on Broadway, and we may wonder what is it about the content of this play that sparked such fire among Lorraine Hansberry's collogues in the theater.

Characteristically, she started out writing the drama with a bold purpose: "It was my hope in the writing of this particular play," she said, "to 'do something' about stage intellectuals (as, indeed, I once hoped that I might 'do something' about stage Negros). The American Theater (and motion pictures) concept of an 'intellectual,' it seems to me, is someone who wears horn-rimmed glasses and exceedingly attractive tweed sports jackets and speaks in stilted phrases until they are shown true 'life' by some earthy mess of a girl in black stockings." She was interested in showing the real depths and complexities behind the apparently simple "intellectual" type that other writers had merely stereotyped. But she ended up doing much more: she wrote a play that probed very deeply, not only into Sidney's character, but also into Sidney's world, that is to say middle-class America in 1964.

Lorraine Hansberry probed deeply because she was concerned with far more than a character portrait: she was attempting, in Sidney Brustein, to grapple with a problem that she had stated earlier in 1964 at a symposium with black artists and white liberals. "The problem is," she had said at that time, "to find some way to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and 

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