Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” debuted on Broadway in 1959 and appeared in London’s West End five months later. The musical adaptation “Raisin” won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1973 and the play had two Broadway revivals in 2004 and 2014. This powerful and ground-breaking story of a financially strapped Chicago South Side Black extended family’s decision to use an insurance payout to purchase a home in an all-white Clybourne Park neighborhood has also inspired a 1989 TV film, a 1996 and 2016 BBC Radio play, a 2008 ABC TV film, and a 2017 Arena Stage revival in Washington, D.C.

Robert O’Hara’s staging in the current iteration at the Public Theater’s Newman Theater explores the kaleidoscopic quality of Hansberry’s characters and augments the play’s eternal themes with a new sense of relevancy and authenticity. Lorraine Hansberry dives deep into the ennui that has settled over the Younger extended family household in the “rat trap” that Lena Younger (a resourceful and imperious Tonya Pinkins) and her husband Big Walter rented two weeks after their marriage decades ago and “wasn’t planning on living here no more than a year.”

Dreams interconnect the various themes in “A Raisin in the Sun.” Lena’s dream of a new home with a garden and her dream of a new start for her family establish the vortex for all her family members’ dreams: Ruth (a resourceful and patient Mandi Masden) and Walter’s dream for a better future and a more stable marriage; Walter’s dream to find agency, acceptance, and worth as a Black husband and father to his son Travis (Toussaint Battiste) through his financial investment with Willy and Bobo (Calvin Dutton); and his sister Beneatha’s (a spirited and determined Paige Gilbert) dream to become a doctor and find her identity as a person and a woman. These dreams have been “deferred” (Langston Hughes) and whether or not they “explode” depends on the synchronicity of purpose playwright Hansberry explores in this perennially important play.

Wealth, race and racism, and dignity are foundational to understanding the matrix of dreams dreamed by the Younger family. Each intertwines with the characters’ dreamscape and informs their construct and deconstruction of their thoughts allowing them to emerge from delusion/fantasy to truth/concrete reality. Self-worth and agency replace Walter’s crippling self-doubt allowing him to finally own his place in the family and in society. His mother finally believes in him and challenges him to become “head of this family like you supposed to be.”

The current iteration of “A Raisin in the Sun” staged by Robert O’Hara at the Public’s Newman Theater goes beyond any earlier production in its bravery and its insistence on authenticity, believability, and relevance to the present. In Act III, after Walter Lee Younger (a broken yet ennobled Francois Battiste) admits to having lost the six-thousand five hundred dollars his mother Lena Younger gave him from her deceased husband’s ten-thousand-dollar insurance money, he invites the realtor Karl Lindner (Jesse Pennington) to the house “to do business with him.”

What follows is unexpected, even to those familiar with Hansberry’s script. Lindner arrives expecting the Youngers to have reconsidered his offer to “buy the house from you at a financial gain to your family.” Instead, Walter, Ruth, and Beneatha “told him to get out.” Walter then breaks the fourth wall and, holding the A Raisin in the Sun” Playbill, addresses the audience and rails against “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman” and every iteration of white privilege, systemic racism, and pervasive whiteness. Robert O’Hara’s instincts here could not be more relevant and urgent.

Lorraine Hansberry was a visionary. Individuals become visionaries not by accident but by design. She was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and her close relationship with James Baldwin, both important queer Black writers of their era.

“For writer James Baldwin, the most striking thing about the play was what it did for African Americans. “I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater,” he wrote. “And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.” (“The Black Revolution and the White Backlash” Forum at Town Hall sponsored by The Association of Artists for Freedom, New York City – June 15, 1964)

That truth exists in Robert O’Hara’s staging of “A Raisin in the Sun.”