To complicate matters, their one son Caleb (Marc Rogers) is a flighty blues singer and guitarist who disappears for years. His home is orderly, routine, quiet, peaceful, and reverent to his golden years. It is also a residual commitment to his deceased wife, who perhaps never deserved his devotion to begin with-let aloneВ his regrettedВ violent actions to both protect and keep her, for which he served time in jail. Stalling) is a senior man with a past, and his sacrificial care for a grandson has been his personal exoneration from that past. George Stalling, Marc Rogers, and David Adams in Sins of the Father Just as real life has no definitive ending or period at the end of the day, the final scene of Sins of the Fathersuggests the story goes on to a new moment immediately but the theatre just has to close. Synthia WilliamsвЂ™ play Sins of the Fatherfalls in line with this tradition of subversive radicalism, with the story of three generations of black men told with such simple purity and grace it is hard to know when or how the play even ends. Masters of yesterday like August Wilson and Ron Milner, as well as new classicists like Lydia Diamond and Pearl Cleage, exploit theatre in its most traditional forms to give the black family home and the love within it credit as all an audience needs. Yet so much more of it also quiets that theme, to make the stage exist primarily for the charactersвЂ™ humanity. Since then, black theatre-like most of black cultural Americana-has continued to include the ongoing African-AmericanВ experienceВ of its oppressive casteВ as a central theme. The fact she was a black woman doing so with a black family proved to be a turning point in commercial success for a flood black playwrights and actors, when the more palatable concerns of family drew larger diverse audiences than politically-charged or вЂњwhite-shamingвЂќ productions had been able to do.

Similar to Arthur MillerвЂ™s and Eugene OвЂ™NeilвЂ™s and Tennessee WilliamsвЂ™В offerings, Hansberry illuminated the family homestead as perhaps the most powerful ground upon which to examine human nature and genius. Marc Rogers and George Stalling in Sins of the Father(all images courtesy of eta Creative Arts)Д«lack theatre broke through in America when Lorraine HansberryвЂ™s seminal 1959 masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun isolated the Negro narrative inside the domestic space, dislocated our relationship to white America in favor of concentration on our relationships to each other, and elevated ordinary people in a black family as characters worthy of epic focus.

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