Opening up to Chicago 1950’s A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was a very enjoyable read. It was fun to picture a lot of what was going on in each scene because each scene is painted out so nicely in words. Not only was the play written so nicely and with witty stage directions but it was packed with good morals for the play reader and watcher. Its funny thinking about something thats supposed to be for entertainment purposes teaching you something as well, it gives the reader life lessons they should know throughout their whole life.
An example of how the play paints a picture is right in the beginning Ruth asks her husband if she wants eggs and he tells her not to scramble them, but she immediately starts scrambling it. I read it twice and it made me laugh both times because I kept picturing a woman vigorously scrambling the eggs and snickering to herself as she did so because shes going against her husband's wishes. It gave humor to a scene that was otherwise about wants and desires from everyone in the family.
A key theme in this play is that money is able to buy happiness, and from all that i've ever been taught I know This isn’t the case, because you lose money, you have to pay for things with it. Its great when you have a large sum of it but when the amount dwindles so does the happiness it brought. We also find early on that there is a lot of ‘want’ involved in the play. Each character wants something, Ruth wants money, Walter wants to buy a liquor store to get more money, and Mama wants to have a nice house with a lawn to be happy. Its sad when people don’t realize what they already have, although they lost Mama’s husband, they still have eachother, its hard to be content with the things you already posses, its human nature to always want more and more. Its one of the 7 deadly sins, Greed, which the Younger Family must know about from their mention of God.
This play reminded my of a play I went to see when I was in Middle school. I believe it was called the ‘Curse of the Monkey Paw’ and it was about a family that somehow obtains monkey paw that grants wishes. And of course the family doesn’t think before they wish, though they were warned to be careful what they wish for, which is another cliche warning we hear a lot. Well the son dies in a tragic work accident, and the rest of the family is so distraught about it that they wish, with the help of the monkey paw for him to come back to life. What the family didn't count of was that their son would rise from the dead and be all mangled up from the work accident and not back to normal. It was a very scary play for little middle schooler me.
Yet another moral I took from the play was that you can't always make everyone happy. When there a people in your life that want one thing, and you want another you can’t always make both people happy. There were many morals in this play that I took from it. Its good to read something like this, because somewhere someone is reading this play and really needed to see the actions that each character took to realize what they should really be doing in their own life. The play is there to be an example to people so that they realize their flaws.
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