In honor of Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (now playing at Chicago’s Goodman Theater) CFA reprieves a program first screened at the Black Cinema House on Dorchester Avenue in 2014. Three films depict the lives of three African-American writers, whose works today are iconic both on the stage and in literary circles. Join Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry in their own voices.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS, 1966, 29 min.
From WTTW’s The Creative Person series. Ms. Brooks reads from her verses and discusses her life and works. Photographic depictions of the atmosphere are the environment in which her poetry takes place.
LORRAINE HANSBERRY: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN THE CREATION OF DRAMA, 1975, 35 min.
This film presents Chicago born writer Lorraine Hansberry’s artistic growth and unique vision expressed in her own words and in her own voice. It traces Ms. Hansberry’s life from her childhood in Chicago to her premature death at the age of 34, her student days at the University of Wisconsin, her work as a fledgling journalist in New York’s Harlem, her life as a Greenwich Village housewife, and her breakthrough as the first woman playwright to be produced on Broadway.
THE WRITER IN AMERICA: TONI MORRISON, 1978, 28 min.
Acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison explains the early impulses and obstacles she confronted as a young writer. She reads excerpts from The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon.
Please note this will be an outdoor screening in the open lot just east of the Arts Center building.