Finally, someone gets “A Raisin in the Sun” absolutely right. That someone is Robert O’Hara, who directs the awesome new revival of the Lorraine Hansberry classic, which opened Tuesday at the Public Theater. What makes this production perfect, beyond being the best acted show in New York City at the moment, is how it addresses a problem in the play that concerned even its original cast members.
In 2004, I interviewed Ossie Davis shortly after the opening of the 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” starring Sean Combs, Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald. Back in 1959, Davis understudied and later replaced Sidney Poitier in the role of the original production’s Walter Lee Younger, the husband and father who wants, against his mother’s wishes, to take his dead father’s insurance money to invest in a liquor store.