To Be Young, Gifted and Black (video) | To Be Young Gifted & Black [VHS]

VHS: To Be Young Gifted & Black [VHS] | Blythe Danner, Barbara Barrie

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	• To Be Young Gifted & Black [VHS] Blythe Danner, Barbara Barrie Monterey Video, 1998 average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Inspired and Inspiring...

I first saw this wonderful pastiche when it aired on PBS-TV in 1972. For the next several years, before it disappeared, I watched it as often as I could. I loved the freewheeling format with the six cast members, three black & three white, playing not only parts from Hansberry plays and remembrances but also the author herself, regardless of the actor's sex. Originally and lovingly compiled by Ms. Hansberry's ex-husband, Robert Nemirov, this TV version radiates with her love of theatre, words, socio-political action, and her compassionate, yet unsentimental, belief in her fellow human beings.

It's hard to single out any of the cast members since they are all so good - and it looked like they were having a ball working with each other on the TV adaptation! They need to be named, however: the late Claudia McNeil (so powerful in Raisin in the Sun, on Broadway and in the film, but getting a chance to show off her comical chops, which she does!), the late Roy Scheider (especially wonderful in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window excerpts), Ruby Dee (who reprises her part in Raisin some 13 years later and looking just as young!), Blythe Danner (appropriately pissed off and desperate as the lost at sea Iris in Sign), Al Freeman, Jr. (the equal of Poitier as Walter Lee Younger - and a performance Diddy should have tried to channel), Barbara Barrie (feisty and funny both as Hansberry's high school English teacher and as Iris' dowdy, middle-class sister in Sign) and Lauren Jones, a young woman whom I'd never seen before or after (sadly), who was memorable as a college-age Lorraine, both in school and out (I love her walking, unrehearsed, through the streets of Harlem).

I was thrilled when I found the TV version had been transferred to VHS (in 1998) and bought a copy. However, it apparently has never seen a DVD release which is unfortunate for several reasons: 1) the inevitable poorer quality of picture & sound on VHS 2) I believe at least one segment from the TV version was left out of the VHS one, a nice little piece of her play, Les Blancs, which featured Al Freeman, Jr. as an African revolutionary returned home after many years in Europe and Roy Scheider as a white American journalist trying to get a rise and a story from this prodigal son. I can still clearly hear Freeman pronounce "ref-er-ren-dum," so I know I didn't make it up.

Please, someone, make To Be Young, Gifted, and Black into a DVD presentation. It cries out for the full version and for interviews from living cast members and from others who knew Ms. Hansberry in her short, but influential life.

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To Be Young, Gifted and Black (video)

This is an excellent video by and about Lorraine Hansberry. The setting is like a stage play, but the reading of the script. The flow is as if you are a part of the drama in her life, cutting from scene to scene as if a memory process. It is not like your normal documentary. It gives life to a narration , but only uses six people.

It's like watching a live production in the making.

I feel that the video is more for an older audience with an interest in theater in order to fully intake the form Lorraine has chosen to present the story. This is not a storybook production, but a piece of theater.

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