“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?” — Langston Hughes

Lorraine Hansberry used Hughes’ poem for the title of her play “A Raisin in the Sun.” It became the first play by a Black woman to debut on Broadway, which it did in 1959. On Wednesday, the iconic play will be produced professionally for the first time in Northwest Arkansas at TheatreSquared.

“At the time, she was saying something that was so revolutionary for the theater, and she knew exactly what she was doing with that,” said Dexter Singleton, director of new play development at TheatreSquared. “She wanted to really, with this play, examine what the American dream meant. Like with that Langston Hughes poem, in 1959, the American dream was not possible for everyone.”

Not possible, Singleton said, because of the rampant racism and segregation all over the country. Hansberry took those ideas and turned them into a beautiful play that would become an American classic. Many people consider it to be one of the best plays ever written: structurally perfect in how the characters develop, thorough in the character arcs and adeptly weaving together their motivations and objectives, as well as the obstacles that stand in their way.

Hansberry explores the American Dream through the eyes of a young family who were looking for the chance to live out their dreams just like everyone else. Over the years, many Black actors have sought the chance to portray Walter Lee, his mother Lena Younger and the other roles of the show.

“Throughout history, the names of actors who have played these parts as well are iconic,” Singleton said. In modern times, they’ve been played by Denzel Washington and Phylicia Rashad (“The Cosby Show.”) Further back they were played by Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil — a Who’s Who list. “A lot of actors want to get the opportunity to do this play because of the actors who’ve done it and the history of the play itself. It’s also like that for many directors.”

Lloyd Richards was the original director of “A Raisin in the Sun,” and he went on to direct nearly all of August Wilson’s work on Broadway, according to American Theatre magazine.

Singleton taught the play for years in his classes when he was a professor. When the opportunity came up to direct it at TheatreSquared, he couldn’t possibly pass up the chance to use so many of the things he had thought about and dissected with his students over the years.

“The opportunity to follow in those iconic footsteps of all those artists who I admire so much is a big challenge with a wonderful play like this one,” he said. “I’m so glad … to explore them with a wonderful company of actors that I’m fortunate to be able to have at TheatreSquared.”

DOMINIC AKA WALTER

Dominic Daniel started his theater journey 30 years ago in a drama program in Detroit, where he was raised. It didn’t take long to know it was right for him.

“Once I got rolling, I knew it was the thing I wanted to do,” Daniel said. After earning his BFA, he started working right away and toured worldwide a couple of times before landing in California. Back then he was doing standup and improv, which turned into commercials and sitcoms, TV and film. If it weren’t for his singing voice, he said, he’d be a triple threat. “When I come back to the theater, doing theater shows, it feels like I’m coming home. It’s my base, it recharges me and also really sharpens me.”

Theatre gives Daniel the chance to do something that the fast-paced nature of TV and other filming do not do: have enough time to play around and work things out more. Whenever he shows up on a set, they don’t talk about it too much before diving in.

Until he makes his TheatreSquared debut, Daniel has never been in “A Raisin in the Sun” before.

“Unless you count the Dominic Daniel basement theater, where I have put on this show many a time,” he said. Daniel’s journey to becoming an actor began when he was just five or six years old, when his grandmother would tell him earnestly that he was going to be just like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. “At the time I didn’t know who the heck they were.”

But as Daniel got older, grandmother made sure he did. There was a time when he entertained ideas for an entirely different path for his life. He was on his way to becoming an FBI agent, taking criminal justice and preparing to go to law school when his grandmother told him “‘Nope, you’re going to be an actor,’” he recalled. “That’s a rare experience … to have that kind of support, not only that, but guidance.”

As an actor, he could play a cop or FBI agent. Years later, when he got to Hollywood, a couple of events solidified Daniel’s thinking that he could actually do this, become an actor. The first was that he met Sidney Poitier and talked to him for 20 minutes.

“This play is one of the things that came up, and this character, playing Walter Lee,” Daniel said. He rattled off a thousand questions and Poitier graciously answered them all. The second chance meeting was with Vin Diesel, who told Dominic his experience of watching his father play the role of Walter.

As a boy, Diesel would sit down in front of the theater, and every time his father (as Walter) said “I will give you the world,” he felt like he was talking directly to him, he told Daniel. Now Dominic is a father.

“The words he says to his son about trying to give him a better life than what he had and give him the world, though everything has changed and shifted, that means so much to me now,” he said. “It’s good to step into those shoes and do it.”

KATHY AKA LENA

Kathy Tyree is in her 45th year of doing theater. She began when she was 15 and warns that “it’s true what they say, when the acting bug bites, you cannot release it.”

About 10 years ago she launched her own production company, but live theater has always been her passion and something to which she returns. About eight years ago she got the opportunity to begin directing. Last year she made her TheatreSquared debut as Baneatta in “Chicken & Biscuits” and Breedlove in Jonathan Norton’s “I Am Delivered’t” during the Arkansas New Play Festival.

“I was so honored to be invited back,” Tyree said. She sees every opportunity as a chance for growth and thinks of her time as an actress here as a fun way to sneak in some free master classes every night as she watches Dexter direct.

Tyree took on the role of Lena once, a little more than a decade ago, in a production of “A Raisin in the Sun” by a white female director. It became clear not long into the experience that she had little knowledge of the Black experience, nor had she done much research into it.

“A lot of what we did on stage … didn’t read as authentic,” Tyree said. “The words didn’t lift from the page and translate into the audience.”

Since then, she’s seen opportunities for Black actors increase. How Black artists show up in theater spaces has grown and changed significantly since then, in part due to the events of the covid era and the Black Lives Matter movement.

While there’s still work to be done to keep the improvements coming, “now when I walk into rooms, more and more there are people on the design side of the table who look like me and can relate to me,” she said. Having a Black director and BIPOC designers go a long way to understanding the nuances of lighting, costuming and enhancing the experience.

During the first readthrough of “A Raisin in the Sun” at TheatreSquared, Tyree realized that “this is about to be something completely different, OK? I’m about to go to the next level with these folks.”

She firmly believes that this production is a particularly special one, and it’s sure to erase the difficulty of her first experience with the iconic play.

WHAT DRIVES THEM

At Walter Lee’s core is a desire to leave more for his son than he received from his father. There’s something universal about that, Dominic Daniel said. He feels that drive as a parent and actually heard something similar from his own dad. His father charged him to do better than he had so that one day his son could top him too. Daniel believes it’s the journey of mankind.

“In all the experiences I’ve had spiritually, intellectually, ultimately … that’s what we should be pushing for,” he said. “We found something one way, we should leave it a little bit better for the next.”

While some audience members could get caught up in what Walter wanted to do with the money he came into (invest in a liquor store partnership), Daniel said that’s not as important as the reason why he wanted the money so badly, which was simply to make his family’s lives better. It all comes back to providing his son with better opportunities and making the idea of the American dream real — “to be able to do whatever you want to do and whatever you put your heart and mind to,” he said.

Family is also Lena Younger’s no. 1 priority, even above herself, Kathy Tyree said. While each character is so different from each other and the dynamics among them complex, they all have the same goal. Lena is responsible for navigating all those different paths and personalities as the head of the family and the glue that binds them.

“As we mothers often do, she thinks she knows best and we don’t always,” Tyree said. Kathy relates to her as a Black woman raising a Black son and watching him grow into a man. She was a single parent herself and says he was truly her priority in all things. “Even when it may have appeared I was doing something for myself or following my career path, it was all ultimately for him.”

That’s how Lena is, she does everything for her son, her daughter and grandson Travis “her pride and joy.” She’s also a strong woman, Tyree said, as a Black woman who has worked in white people’s homes for most of her adult life, she had many difficult encounters. Tyree thinks about how many times she must have bit her tongue or had to turn the other cheek. Now, after her husband has died, the burden of holding the family together rests on her shoulders alone.

NOT TAKEN LIGHTLY

As TheatreSquared’s crew prepares for opening night, each member has something in mind that they’re working toward and hoping to land just right. For Tyree, she feels it’s important to get the lines verbatim in this iconic piece that’s a part of Black culture. Plenty of people in the audience will be familiar with the words and will know if they’re changed or paraphrased, she said.

But getting those lines straight is also in homage to Lorraine Hansberry herself, whose life was cut extremely short, just five years into her career.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to do her work,” Tyree said. She thinks to herself “‘What was I doing when I was 29?’” the age Hansberry was when she wrote the play. “‘I wasn’t this progressive. I wasn’t involved in activism the way she was.’”

Singleton feels a responsibility with making the first professional production of the play in the region and hopes it will wind up being one the theatre and Northwest Arkansas can be proud of.

“I hope families can attend together and learn from it and have those discussions post-show,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to look at the past … see how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.”