“A Whole Lot of Sunlight”: Urban Segregation and the Pursuit of Utopia in Lorrraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park.”

This essay performs a comparative reading of the two plays by Hansberry (1959) and Norris (2010) claiming that the latter, an evident spin-off of the former, fails to engage the activist question Hansberry articulated. Despite their focus on similar issues of urban segregation, gentrification, and racial tensions, in fact, these plays mirror the radically different attitudes of their authors toward the social function of theater and the political potential in performing hope and utopia on stage.