Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

New Revised Version 5 black m, 3 white m, 2 white f, 1 black f, 6 extras including 1 child Unit set Best American play of 1970, Les Blancs prophetically confronts the hope and tragedy of Africa in revolution. The setting is a white Christian mission in a colony about to explode. The time is that hour of reckoning when no one the guilty nor the innocent can evade the consequences of white colonialism and imperatives of black liberation. Tshembe Matoseh, the English educated son of a chief, has

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Africa, Classics, African American, Theatre

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play.

Reviews

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much more than even my high expectations. Ambitious and nuanced and raw.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bumped this to four stars for the raw talent of Hansberry, but overall what's presented is a 3.

Les Blancs is a fascinating play, particularly considering how forward thinking it was (Hansberry was a true visionary, in my opinion). It's a story about the clash of civilizations, expectations, and family played out in the war for African independence. The themes are mostly deftly handled and deeply felt. However, unfortunately, Hansberry died before completing the play, and it was finished by her ex-husbsnd and literary executor Robert Nemiroff. And frankly, you can tell, and it's not in a good way. The dialogue in particular stands out compared to Raisin in the Sun, where it was a highlight, and overall I got an unfortunate sense that in places the message was lost. I don't think Nemiroff had the experience or ability to complete this tale, and it's a damn shame.

The Drinking Gourd was a teleplay that was never produced due to fear and racism. It's an interesting tale of slavery and the South in direct and sharp opposition to the likes of Gone With The Wind - again Hansberry had incredible, visionary talent to tackle a wide range of issues. However, a TV script turns out to not read as well as a play. I still greatly enjoyed it, but definitely for the content and the promise it held, while the form left me a bit cold.

What Use Are Flowers? is a little oddity - a short play about the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. It's interesting, giving us a hermit discovering a small band of feral child survivors, and I love apocalyptic fiction, but overall it didn't amount to much. Hard to describe, but I guess I'd just say it didn't have the power of her other works.

It really was a tragedy Hansberry died so young. She had such immense talent. Reading this collection, however, is probably for completists only. I'm glad I did, but as I said, it has more potential than promise.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The immensely gifted and tragically short-lived playwright Lorraine Hansberry's final play, Les Blancs, is joined here with two TV scripts that were shelved for mostly political reasons. Though most known for the wonderful A Raisin in the Sun, the first two dramas in this collection, Les Blancs (an anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist play with some impressive stagecraft to go with its scathing indictment of imperial core liberal moralizing and hand-wringing) and The Drinking Gourd (intended to be the first part of an ambitious multi-part Civil War anthology series commemorating the Centennial of Emancipation, it takes place on a cotton plantation just as the Civil War is about to kick off, and both underscores the lie of the "benevolent slave owner" and subverts brilliantly the "Mammy" trope featured in so many films, plays and novels by white artists), are every bit its equal and the reason I rate this volume so highly. Each shows Ms. Hansberry to have had her finger firmly on the pulse of the growing push for civil rights (for which she was a prominent activist) and to be a tremendously talented, socially-engaged artist. The one-act What Use are Flowers? is a post-apocalyptic fable that is not without its charms but considerably less impressive than the other two pieces. Sadly, The Drinking Gourd has still never been produced in full, but Les Blancs has had a number of successful stagings, including an acclaimed production in 1970 that starred the great James Earl Jones in a much-lauded performance.

[Jake Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for a class and loved it! Makes me want to revisit A Raisin in the Sun since I was so angsty when I read that last.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

The play wasn’t completed by Lorraine Hansberry before she died from cancer but her husband, who she had a collaborative relationship with, helped finish it off and it ran for a brief time on stage. In the afterward of this play, it highlighted the racist reviews and while some critics gave it high praise, it was the Times critic’s harsh review, with heavy racist undertones, that stopped it from being a well known classic like it should have been.
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The play itself is about a man leaving his wife and infant son, to return home to an undisclosed African country, to bury his father. There is a warrior who only appears to him (and the audience) performing a dance and offering a weapon, an offer for the main character to take up the cause, which he continues to decline, up until a tragedy occurs and he has no other choice. A naive white journalist arrives at the mission and very quickly learns that his interjections have no impact on the actual war taking place and the mission may not be as amazing as he believes.
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This play is funny in parts and is clever at showing the impact of colonisation, intergenerational trauma and the internal conflict within oneself.
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I would love to see this play on stage. I gave it 5 stars.
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The other ‘plays’ started out as scripts for television/film.

The Drinking Gourd takes place on a slave plantation and deftly looks at the complicated relationship between slave, overseer and master and defies the belief that a slave would choose their master over their own child.
5 stars.

What Use are Flowers? takes place in an dystopian setting, where only a group of children are left and a hermit comes out of deep hiding and tries to teach, but how do you explain beauty to children who have never experienced the concept?
4 stars.
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Overall, I would give this overall collection 5 stars and recommend it as a classic

[Ostap Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s an absolute shame that Lorraine Hansberry died so young at 34. She was so intelligent and insightful, and as these last plays of hers show, quite a playwright. There are three plays in this collection, with substantial background and contextual material, and I’ll comment on each.

Les Blancs – finished by her ex-husband after she passed away, this play deals with colonialism in Africa. While it made people uncomfortable or delighted when it was first performed (often depending on their race, or at least, their political views), I found it quite balanced. She gives us African characters who are simmering with resentfulness for the exploitation their continent endured for centuries, but she also gives us one who left to travel and get educated in Europe, as well as another who converted to Christianity and sees the missionary’s perspective. She gives us Caucasian characters who are condescending and who thinly veil their racism, but she also gives us those who did charitable work for years, and one who seems to want to engage in dialogue. Hansberry had a knack for putting her finger right on the nub of issues, and it’s through this range of characters that she reveals racial and power dynamics. This passage was fantastic:

“I do not ‘hate’ all white men – but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves above Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the Metro at dawn and too many hungry Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever ‘loved’ the white race either. I would like to be simple-minded for you, but … I cannot. I have … seen.”

You see in this comment the universality behind what seems to be a specific context. Additionally, while the play is set in Africa, the link to America is clear, especially when one character points out that the American South was itself an apartheid system, and then asks:

“And just why should we be able to ‘talk’ so easily? What is this marvelous nonsense with you Americans? For a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey you want three hundred years to disappear – and in five minutes! Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?”

Later one of the white doctors makes this point: “They [the courts] are not ideal, if that is what you mean. But I expect our standards of jurisprudence in matters of race will compare favorably with America’s any day!”

It’s a play with a viewpoint to be clear, stating that those in power will never voluntarily give it up unless forced to in the quote by Frederick Douglass in the preface (which I extract below), and in the comment a white character makes towards the end that Africa needs warriors, because “a line goes on into infinity unless it is bisected.” Plays with viewpoints are likely to challenge or provoke us, and this one does that, and in very good ways. (4 stars)

The Drinking Gourd – this play was written originally on commission for a television event to honor the centennial of the Civil War, one that was ultimately cancelled as network executives feared offending Southern viewers and going near the powder keg of race issues that Americans had still not confronted (and haven’t fully to this day). I was blown away by how good this one was. Meticulously researched, Hansberry doesn’t simplistically give us just the physical cruelty of slavery, she also reveals the economic realities of life in the South, and engages in the psychology of all of her characters, black and white. She correctly understood that a critical aspect to keeping four million slaves and the system in place was to keep six to seven million poor whites in the mindset of protecting the system, even if it was one that also impoverished them (recognize any parallels to today?)

She doesn’t reduce any of her characters to simple types, and most tellingly, avoids even what may seem like positive African-American character types – for example, the ‘Mammy’ type. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was an aspect of psychology that went into the creation of this tough but sweet and forgiving character type, often by well-intentioned and liberal white writers. It is just so hard to confront the horror of slavery, to stare it completely in the face, and one of the coping mechanisms is to consciously or subconsciously make those who were so cruelly subjected to it somehow different from other people. An outright racist makes them lesser, inferior beings. A well-intentioned person might embrace the idea that these were simple, gentle people, steeped in Christianity, and had a deep wellspring of forgiveness. Either robs them of their humanity, and softens the blow for us today which should not be softened. Hansberry recognized this, and in a critical insight wrote:

“Guilt would to bear too swiftly and painfully if white America were really obliged quite suddenly to think of the Negro quite as he is, that is, simply as a human being. That would raise havoc … White America has to believe not only that the oppression of the Negro is unfortunate (because most of White American does believe that), but something else, to keep its sense of the unfortunate from turning into a sense of outrage … White America has to believe that Blacks are different, and not only so, but that, by the mystique of this difference, they actually profit in certain charming ways which escape the rest of us with all our engrossing complexities.”

The play was eye-opening to me and made me challenge the things I had grown up with and seen, even material that was trying to communicate that slavery and racism are wrong. The background material was also fantastic, and I quote from it extensively below. (4.5 stars)

What Use are Flowers? – This short play is set in a dystopian future where an old man who has been away for decades comes down out of the woods ala Rip van Winkle to find that civilization is gone, and only illiterate, animalistic children remain. It reminded me a little of Jack London’s ‘The Scarlet Plague’, and while the concept is solid and it served as a delivery vehicle for some of Hansberry’s deepest personal convictions about life despite all of its struggles, I just don’t think it was developed as well as it could have been. (3.5 stars)

Summing up - Hansberry was not resigned to despair, a pessimist, or an absurdist, despite all of the evil she had seen in life. In one speech she outlines this, saying “I have, like all of you, on a thousand occasions seen indescribable displays of man’s very real inhumanity to man, and I have come to maturity, as we all must, knowing that greed and malice and indifference to human misery and bigotry and corruption, brutality, and perhaps above all else, ignorance – the prime ancient and persistent enemy of man – abound in this world.”

In spite of all that, she was an optimist, writing so poignantly “I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to reason enough and – I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.”

She was also an activist, and a fighter, one who fought with her intellect, words, and the unvarnished truth. She believed that honest dialogue would lead to clarity and then ultimately action, preferably peaceful action, but knowing that that wasn’t always possible.

Quotes:
On struggle and progress, from Frederick Douglass, quoted in the preface to Les Blancs:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both … Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do that by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

On slavery:
“Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred million of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa. But then – history has not yet been concluded … has it?”

And in this searing passage from a letter from January 11, 1964:
“But I have long since learned that it is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald – they just dressed more attractively and their accents are softer. (I know I switched tenses.)”

On the Civil War and slavery, which I found far ahead of its time, and something we still see as a problem reaching a melting point today:
“And I am so profoundly interested to realize that in these 100 years since the Civil War very few of our countrymen have really believed that their Federal Union and the defeat of the slavocracy and the negation of slavery as an institution is an admirable fact of American life. So that it is now possible to get enormous books on the Civil War and to go through the back of them and not find the word ‘slavery,’ let alone ‘Negro.’
We’ve been trying very hard – this is what Jimmy and I mean when we speak of guilt – we’ve been trying very hard in America to pretend that this greatest conflict didn’t even have at its base the only thing it had as its base: where person after person will write a book today and insist that slavery was not the issue! You know, they tell you it was the ‘economy’ – as if that economy was not based on slavery. It’s become a great semantic game to try and get this particular blot out of our minds, and people spend volumes discussing the battles of the Civil War, and which army was crossing which river at five minutes to two, and how their swords were hanging, but the slavery issue we have tried to get rid of. To a point that while it has been perfectly popular, admirable, the thing to do – all my life since Gone with the Wind - to write anything you wanted about the slave system and beautiful ladies in big, fat dresses screaming as their houses burned down from the terrible, nasty, awful Yankees…”

[Imani ♥ ☮ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review later.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Les Blancs is on (post)colonialism. Gourd is on slavery. Flowers is on beauty/civilization.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only reason I rated this with three stars is simply for the lack of readability. The dramatic performance would receive a 5-star rating for its commentary in response to Les Negres, for its discussion of colonialism, for its relationship to the ongoing narrative of racism and worldview, and for Hansberry’s use of her final play to close her series of using voice to create change.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of Hansberry prior to this. I would love to see this play staged now, it’s still pertinent and relevant. The inclusion and discussion of the theater critics reviews of the play adds to the depth of the experience of this play.

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Les Blancs, but was fairly disinterested in the other two plays.

[whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow wow wow. plays are usually my weakness as an english major but this was just too exquisite.

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

** 4 stars **

This collection consists of three previously unpublished plays by Lorraine Hansberry (who became famous for her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun): Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?

Les Blancs, which was nearly complete when Hansberry died from cancer in 1965, was finished by her former partner Robert Nemiroff. This play concerns colonialism in Africa and demonstrates that, while there are typically bad people AND well-meaning people on both sides of the conflict (colonizers and the colonized), one must make a decision about which side to join rather than sitting around reasoning and rationalizing until it is too late to contribute something of value to the cause.

The Drinking Gourd was a screenplay written for a never-aired series on NBC on the American Civil War. It exposes the brutalities that the system of American slavery inflicted on the enslaved, the slave-owners, and the (oftentimes) poor white overseers. While these brutalities are not equal, Hansberry shows that slavery has tragic consequences for all involved.

What Use Are Flowers? is a one-act play in which a hermit who has lived alone in the forest for 20 years finally decides to return to civilization, only to find that there has been some kind of apocalyptic event that has destroyed nearly all life on earth. He finds a roving band of feral 9-10 year-old children and attempts to educate them so that they can continue civilization after his death.

For me, I would rank these three plays as follows in terms of how effective I found them: The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers, and Les Blancs. The Drinking Gourd has the most well-rendered, well-rounded characters. While Les Blancs asks important questions about colonialism, I found it overly didactic and the characters read as types rather than real people with interior lives.

There is an introduction to each play written by Robert Nemiroff that details its production history and why the play didn't make it to the stage (or in the case of The Drinking Gourd, the screen) prior to Hansberry's death. These I found quite interesting and informative. I would recommend this collection if you are a fan of Hansberry and/or A Raisin in the Sun and want to know more about this playwright's work and philosophical concerns and interests.

[Robert Teeter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing play. It's about race. Is it real? Does it matter? (Those are two different questions.) It's about a history of colonialism and racism and paternalism -- and how those things can ever be unwound. It's about people with different assumptions and personal histories and how they get along. It's still highly relevant.

The play was written by the African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, left unfinished at her early death in 1965, but edited for the stage by her husband, Robert Nemiroff. It's set in a fictional African country ruled by a white minority. As the play begins, Tshembe, a man who has traveled in Europe and America, has returned home for his father's funeral. In the village where Tshembe grew up is a mission hospital and church, run by Europeans. Tshembe's brothers, Abioseh and Eric, have changed since he left home. In the capital, an African leader named Kumalo is trying to negotiate a peaceful transition to majority rule, but the younger generation is not inclined to wait. Back in the village, Major Rice takes a hard line against those he calls "terrorists." An American journalist, Charlie Morris, has arrived to write about the country.

In the midst of all of this, Tshembe must figure out what role, if any, he will take in this society. Sometimes, he'd rather be back in London watching the telly with his red-haired wife and son. A symbolic woman and various realistic characters try to sway Tshembe one way or the other. One character pointedly tells an African fable of the hyena who needed to think about what to do in his species' conflict with the elephants, and while the hyena was thinking, the elephants moved in and took their territory. When Charlie Morris expresses naive liberal platitudes, Tshembe explains to him that things are not as simple as he thinks. (Several characters point out America's hypocrisy on matters of race and imperialism.)

I don't want to give too much away, but some characters have revelations made about them and some characters take a stand, and it all comes to a climax.

[Niki · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up in order to read The Drinking Gourd, a screenplay created for television. Commissioned by one of the major networks to inaugurate a commemorative series to mark 100th anniversary of the Civil War, this was never produced, despite positive comments by TV execs. Politics seem to have gotten in the way... So I read this in my interest to understand that racial politics of the 1960s and to see a different type of source on my perpetual issue of teaching slavery through literature. (For the latter, I found this piece too reliant upon the playwright's notes for visual/audio supports to "tell" the story.) Still bold for its time.

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to understand colonialism? Want to stop being a liberal? Want to have your life changed? Want to really, fully, truly confront the brutality of human history? Want to end it all with a glimmer of hope? Start here...

[Kim Whitman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrote on the title play for my master's degree. Easily one of the most complex texts about race in the United States I've ever read.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good! so underknown/underrated/unappreciated!!

[Kelsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn’t written in June 2020?
...No?
...ohhhhhh.

[Not Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

National theatre adaptation 2016

[Margaret Carmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lorraine Hansberry dying at 34 is a tragedy.

This collection of three of her final plays is stunning in the breadth of the subject matter and in her bravery to confront the nuance of the Black experience, both in America and beyond. All of these stories might seem not action packed at first, but once you dig deep and start examining each character as someone speaking for a different segment of the community during these times it gives a new heft to her meaning. She was telling truths this country wasn't ready for then and likely aren't ready for now.

Les Blancs is a fascinating look at missionary work in Africa, colonization, the African independence movement and everyone caught in between. Was there a good way to be a white man working in Africa during colonization? Or did it compromise everyone? Can freedom fighters be terrorists? And what constitutes betrayal of oneself? It's a must read play, and envisioning James Earl Jones on the Broadway stage playing Tsembe is amazing.

The Drinking Gourd and its depiction of slavery on a southern plantation on the cusp of the Civil War also blew me away. It explores the narrative of the "kindly slave master," the institution of slavery itself and how southerners viewed themselves at the cusp of the war. The character of Hiriam Sweet and his conflicted feelings over slavery is familiar territory, but it took on a new life with contrast to his militantly racist son Everett and the looming conflict over the soul of the region. Another classic that was unfortunately censored from the country's television screens.

The reason I rated this collection five stars was because of What Use Are Flowers? It felt out of sync with the rest of the plays here and I was less interested in the subject matter after the first two powerful plays. Maybe I need to reread it as a standalone to get it or check out more criticism, but this was a work I truly did not connect with.

All in all, Hansberry was a master.

[Eugene Melino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Les Blanc addresses the issue of systemic racism half a century before it became a thing. Racism corrupts everything it touches, turning a Christian mission into an agent of oppression that all of its service to the poor Africans cannot ameliorate.

The characters are types, but unlike characters in crude polemical plays, they are not clichés. Hansberry has created well-rounded characterizations for all the main characters.

The play dramatizes a moral argument, but it never devolves into a morality play. While it clearly delineates the good guys from the bad guys, it makes both sides problematic. The good guys engage in heinous acts of violence against innocents, but clearly centuries of oppression and broken promises have brought them to wrath. The bad guys often bring actual healing and enlightenment to the Africans, yet they never rise above their racism. In fact, they feel totally justified in their sense of racial superiority. This play offers no easy answers, only hard questions.

Tshembe, Abioseh, Eric, the three brothers, and Madame Nielsen love each other even as race politics divide them. By making them vulnerable, love imperils them in ways that complicate their conflicts and intensify the dramatic tension.

[M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first and last play here are the most interesting, in fact the absurdist tone of the third, was very impressive as it had one character fruitlessly trying to rebuild the meaning of life in the face of destruction.

I shall review the first since it's what I read as a part of the PopSugar Challenge

25. A book about a family

"TSHEMBE: You'd approve of Okele, Eric. He got two girls in a fix: one European and one black American. And he sent them both to an East Indian abortionist. (He laughs and sets back). "

A common point to focus on when discussing Les Blancs is Hansberry's visceral reply to Jean Genet's Les Noires. In her problematic portrayal of Catholicism through Abioseh's vocation to the priesthood, formulated in terms of acceptance of the Supreme morality of humankind, and the supposed exaltation of Tshembe's ways there seems to be more than meets the eye. It is sadly a posthumous play finished by her late husband, so we'll never know what kind of end she would have written instead.

Ultimately, Tshembe's motives for revolution and self-awareness bring him to slaughtering his own blood.

[Kenneth Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m so happy to have read this collection of 3 plays by the amazing Lorraine Hansberry. Each of the plays is totally different and offers its own universe to explore and ponder. Hansberry is great at fleshing out her characters and raising questions about morality and humanity as a whole.

Les Blancs details an uprising against colonialism in an African country. The Drinking Gourd follows a group of slaves and the white family that owns them on a plantation. What Use Are Flowers? is a post apocalyptic play in which an old hermit returns to civilization and takes it upon himself to educate the last surviving human children.

Each of these plays is full of complexity and shades of gray, providing plenty opportunity for thought and discussion. I am truly honored to live in a universe in which Hansberry did too.

5 out of 5

[Barner Konvicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

When a hyena laughs, Hansberry reminds her readers why, positioning herself as a humanist, oracle, and soothsayer with a sixth sense for drama. Hansberry channels her anger to reveal an acute sensitivity to the beauty of humanity even in her most tragic works such as Les Blancs. Unwilling to relent to facile simplifications and flat characters without nuance, Hansberry took the manuscript of Les Blancs through two hospitals and then it remained to-be-finished following her far too early death. At it’s end, Hansberry signals a total redefinition of home and loyalty, imparting some of her universal empathy onto all of her readers.

[Sophia's Typo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I want to speak only about "What Use Are Flowers?", a short play at the back of the book.

The title introduces the play well; it is all, really, a question, a kind of painful crawl into the nature of humanity. Hansberry is digging deeper, asking, asking, searching restlessly for answers about what is the actual difference between people and animals, how we define humanity and civilization.

The story of a hermit who tries to teach abandoned kids all of the cultural and scientifical knowledge he finds most useful despite the heavy philosophical matter is mesmerising.
I highly advise, above all, for all of the teachers and mentors to read it.

[Seth Kindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fan of Lorraine's work I went into this book with high expectations, I was not disappointed.

"Les Blancs" was a wonderful play, possibly my favorite work of hers. "The Drinking Gourd" was also a great read and provided us a rather unique glimpse into the world of slavery prior to the civil war. As always Lorraine does a wonderful job of describing the plight of her characters, particularly those who are black.
The final play in the book was "What Use are Flowers". It was decent, but pales in comparison to the others.

I'd highly recommend this.

[Ky · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Les Blancs

5th star is retained due to the story not completely being Hansberry’s. I have something against creative work being released posthumously. I receive it as exploitation. Being that I’ve read the play, I appreciate it. It’s powerful and profound, but unfortunately suffers at the tail end due to what can only be intervention by Nemiroff to pull together the intended ending. It begs the question of what the play would look like if Hansberry was able to finish it. A far better written ending is undeniable in this imagined reality.

[Em H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love.

It's a shame I haven't picked this up sooner, as A Raisin in the Sun is one of my favorite plays. I really enjoyed this collection. "Les Blancs" and "The Drinking Gourd" are both knockout plays about race & racism, both local to the United States and globally, violence, etc. They're both difficult reads, but so grounded and well articulated through Hansberry's stunning characterization. I'd love to see both of them performed.

"What Use Are Flowers" is an interesting, speculative look at the aftermath of nuclear war.

[Joseph Hillyard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another brilliant, topical play from the late Lorraine Hansberry, it will always be a shame that she died so young because even in her incomplete works l, her voice comes through so clearly. Like with Sidney Brustein's Window, there are definitely moments that had Hansberry lived, would have benefited from revisions, but in its current state, Les Blancs is a powerful look at the effects of decolonization.