Word: beneatha
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Younger family are packed in a sunless Chicago South Side tenement flat. There is white-haired, wide-girthed Mother Younger (Claudia McNeil), a matriarchal Rock of Gibraltar; her son Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier), 35, who finds his chauffeur's uniform a strait jacket; his younger sister Beneatha (Diana Sands), a race-conscious progressive who wants to be a doctor; Walter's wife Ruth (Ruby Dee), who yearns for a grassy reprieve from the soot-and-asphalt jungle; and the Youngers' small boy Travis (Glynn Turman), whose main problem is to be first in the communal bathroom down...
Raisin might be somber, or merely sentimental, if its milieu were not so sharply observed, its speech so flavorful, and its infectious sense of fun so caustic. Much of the laughter wells up around Beneatha, a girl of earnest intellectual fads. When a Nigerian boy friend introduces her to a bit of African lore, she promptly decks herself out as "the queen of the Nile," and whirls across the room to click off a jazz program ("Enough of this assimilationist junk...
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