If you’re looking for a quirky spin on A Raisin in the Sun like their greaser version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, you won’t find it at the Guthrie.  What you will find is Lou Bellamy directing Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play faithfully, and performed by skilled actors from Penumbra Theatre, the Twin Cities noted African American theater.  Some of the cast is onstage as the audience trickles in, sweeping slowly around the cramped apartment that serves as the set for the entire play, and as soon as the lights go down, the rest emerge, drawing us in to the tale of money, desperation, dreams and race in America. 

For anyone who somehow missed reading the play in school, the story is about an impoverished African American family, living on top of each other in a too-small apartment in Chicago in the 1950’s, worrying about how to spend some insurance money coming after the death of the patriarch.  Everyone in the family has different ideas about how the money could best be used to advance the family’s needs, or in some cases, their own.  All the Younger family members have a lot of personal issues eating away at them, and it constantly causes conflict in the household.

Despite the cues that place the play clearly in the past, the ideas are still timely: money woes, “not in my back yard” attitudes, family members struggling to be united while trying desperately to grow into the people they dream about being.  In these difficult times, who can’t relate to feverish dreams of how to spend a little money, imagining that it might make everything better?  If that sounds too depressing, rest assured that there are moments of humor and playfulness, and that one is left with an apropos message: Hope.

A Raisin in the Sun is playing at the Guthrie McGuire Proscenium Stage through April 11.
$24-$70.