First things first.  Ebony Repertory Theatre’s A Raisin in the Sun should be seen by every Los Angeles theater lover.

Empty seats dotted sections of the beautiful, mid-sized Nate Holden Performing Arts Center at the Saturday matinee. Most of the seats that were filled were occupied by African Americans. That’s probably OK with Ebony Rep, a black-targeted theater company, but it doesn’t speak well for the non-black LA theater audience. Every seat should be filled, and not just with African Americans.

Kenya Alexander, Kevin Carroll and Deidrie Henry in A RAISIN IN THE SUN.

Ebony’s founder/producer Wren Brown told LA Stage Times that “A Raisin in the Sun is the absolute American classic, not a black American classic.”  While “the” in his claim might imply that no other play is comparable – which would be a tad hyperbolic – the gist of what he said is accurate. At least in Phylicia Rashad’s staging, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 masterpiece stakes a convincing claim that it is up there in the pantheon of all-time great American plays.

It’s tempting to think that it must be dated, because so much has happened in the history of African Americans since 1959. And, as I wrote earlier, I wish that some enterprising producer or company had arranged to schedule the LA premiere of Clybourne Park, which loosely advances Hansberry’s story forward 50 years, to be concurrent with or quickly following Ebony’s revival of A Raisin in the Sun.

Still, nothing feels dated about Rashad’s staging. Although the script touches on many topical issues from a 1959 perspective, variations of these issues are still with us. More important is that the play isn’t primarily about its issues. It’s about the characters and their achingly human but sometimes clashing aspirations.

The main characters occupy a run-down Chicago apartment: Lena Younger (L. Scott Caldwell), her married son Walter (Kevin Carroll) and her daughter Beneatha (Kenya Alexander), Walter’s wife Ruth (Deidrie Henry) and son Travis (Brandon David Brown).

Lena is awaiting a life insurance payment after the death of her husband, and the play’s  clashes are triggered by disagreements over what to do with the money. A home of their own – even one that’s in an all-white neighborhood? A business for Walter, albeit in the somewhat tarnished form of a liquor store? Medical school for Beneatha?. Choices like these bring to the forefront a whole world of dreams both deferred and revived. Hansberry’s skill at weaving these dreams and themes together when she was only 29 years old is prodigious; her death five years later was a severe blow to the American theater.

L. Scott Caldwell and Deidrie Henry in A RAISIN IN THE SUN

I doubt that you will see a better production of A Raisin in the Sun than Ebony’s. The last revival in LA, above the 99-seat level, toured in 1987 through the much larger Wilshire Theatre, where the play wasn’t nearly as intimate or as involving as it is at Ebony Rep’s home. The running time for that production, which reportedly included material that had been cut even before the play’s Broadway debut, was 3½ hours – this one, by contrast, is about 45 minutes shorter and feels perfectly paced.

I didn’t see the 2004 revival on Broadway, which earned Rashad a Tony Award for acting the role of Lena Younger, but reports indicated that the production was skewed to the celebrity, if not to the talents, of Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs in the role of Walter. Engaging in nothing but speculation here, I couldn’t help but wonder if Rashad saw this production as a way to fix the problems of that Broadway production. By casting the formidable but unjustifiably obscure Carroll as Walter, she certainly managed to erase any lingering whiff of celebrity skewing.

In 2004, Rashad hadn’t even started her directing career. This production is only her second professional gig as a stage director. A young director who did this well on her second job would start getting a reputation as a genius.

In January, after several mostly-black-themed productions from mainstream theaters won Ovation Awards, I raised the question of whether black-specific theaters were still necessary. If it takes a black-specific company to revive A Raisin in the Sun with such vigor, I guess the answer is yes.

On the other hand, the last Ebony Rep production, Crowns, got an extension at a mainstream theater, the Pasadena Playhouse. Although that production had its charms, it was insignificant and forgettable next to A Raisin in the Sun.  So the question arises – why isn’t a mainstream theater company rushing to book this Raisin in the Sun?

The Pasadena Playhouse, of course, went bankrupt and then came back to life in the period since it presented Crowns, but I don’t understand why its financial state would prohibit a second partnership with the Ebony Rep to extend this already-produced Raisin. Nor should Sheldon Epps and the Pasadena Playhouse be the only mainstream players in town when it comes to recognizing and extending a production of this quality.

What about Center Theatre Group?  The other big revival I saw last weekend was the CTG revival of Burn This, at the Taper. It happened to follow by barely a week the death of its writer, Lanford Wilson. But other than this coincidence, which wasn’t even considered when the play was selected, I couldn’t detect any other reason why Burn This should be revived here and now. It’s a long-winded, somewhat foul-mouthed, ultimately predictable romantic comedy that isn’t even one of Wilson’s best works. It’s a glorified actors’ showcase.

Adam Rothenberg, Zabryna Guevara and Brooks Ashmanskas in BURN THIS.

The leading man (in Nicholas Martin’s production, Adam Rothenberg) plays the very hetero brother of a gay dancer who has just been killed in an accident, and we hear how much the two brothers resembled each other. On the way home, it hit me that the play would have been much more interesting, even on the showcase level, if the same actor had played the gay dancer in the first act and then played the raffish straight brother in the second act. But that would have required Wilson to have streamlined his chatter and to have thought up a structure that would have been a little more complicated than the can-we-talk realism that he embraced.

Even better, of course, would have been a CTG decision to have skipped Burn This and to have arranged a producing partnership with Ebony Rep on A Raisin in the Sun. I know that it can be hard to predict how a production will go, months in advance, but if no mainstream theater saw fit to co-produce Ebony Rep’s A Raisin in the Sun, then Ebony Rep has proved that black-specific theaters are not obsolete.

A Raisin in the Sun, Ebony Repertory Theatre at Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, 4718 W. Washington Blvd. LA. Thur-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes April 17. 323-964-9766. www.ebonyrep.org.

Burn This, Center Theatre Group at Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown LA. Tue-Fri 8 pm; Sat 2:30 and 8 pm; Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Closes May 1. 213-628-2772. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.

The biggest-scale premiere of the past weekend was Summer of Love, a new concoction from Roger Bean, this time working on a much larger canvas than he did in The Marvelous Wonderettes, Winter Wonderettes or Life Could Be a Dream.

Katrice Gavino, Eric Anderson and Christine Horn in SUMMER OF LOVE.

It’s a jukebox musical about a band of hippies in Golden Gate Park, circa 1967, and how they lure a runaway bride from uptight Sausalito into their encampment, although she is soon pursued by her even more uptight, would-be groom.

Although I usually prefer almost any original new musical to almost any jukebox musical, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was having a lot more fun at Musical Theatre West’s production of Summer of Love than I had at the latest incarnation of the similarly themed but non-jukebox musical Hair, seen at the Pantages in January.

Bean placed 23 Golden Oldies into his libretto with considerably more polish and concern about whether they actually fit into the plot than you will find in many jukebox musicals. And his plot isn’t only more coherent than that of Hair, but it focuses on two young people who make the journey into the counterculture, as opposed to one young man who leaves his hippie friends in Hair (for reasons that have never been very persuasive).

The ending of Summer of Love is a lot moonier and more upbeat than that of Hair. The libretto is no masterwork, but then it would be difficult to insert 23 pre-written songs into any storyline without a few loose ends. Bean’s cast, led by the irrepressible Eric Anderson (of Troubie fame) as the hairy leader of the tribe, transcends the inherent implausibilities and turns Summer of Love into a guilty pleasure.

Summer of Love, Musical Theatre West at Carpenter Center, Cal Stage Long Beach campus, 6200 E. Atherton St., Long Beach. Thur-Fri, 8 pm; Sat 2 and 8 pm; Sun 2 pm, added performance April 10, 7 pm. Closes April 17. 562-856-1999 ext 4. www.musical.org.
A Raisin in the Sun and Burn This photos by Craig Schwartz.

Summer of Love photo by Alysa Brennan.