Photos by Peter Jennings / Courtesy of Arizona Theatre Company; Illustration by Renee Fullerton / ARizona Daily Star

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When Lorraine Hansberry was a young girl in Chicago, blacks had their neighborhoods, whites had theirs. Her father, a real estate agent, saw the injustice in that. He moved the family into a housing area that had a covenant barring blacks from living there. The community was outraged. They tried to bar the Hansberry family's move. He sued. And won.

The incident was the inspiration for Lorraine Hansberry's breakthrough play, "A Raisin in the Sun," which Arizona Theatre Company opens in previews Saturday.

But she wanted it to give an intimate and true portrait of the black experience, just as much theater had done for the white experience.

"A Raisin in the Sun" was a struggle to get onstage, but she was able to take it to Broadway — the first African-American woman with a hit on the Great White Way.

The New York Times said it changed the theater forever.

" 'Raisin' is an intimate peek into a black family," said Lou Bellamy, director of the ATC production, talking from his Minneapolis home.

"When it was first produced 50 years ago, it was America's first peek into a black family."

The Younger family, the group at the center of the play, is a good, respectful family. The story is the struggle between their dreams and what they do to accomplish them.

"It's a rather clean look at their experience, but I think it's a true one," said Bellamy.

"This discussion of a dream deferred is wonderful. And you see this tremendous potential in all these people."

That kind of potential is one of the great tragedies in this country's history of racial policies, said Bellamy.

"I think that's what America has missed most; we've missed that potential," he said, adding that with the election of Barack Obama, "it'll hopefully be freed up now."

But certainly Hansberry's potential was realized — or was beginning to be realized; she died of cancer in 1965 when she was just 34. "Raisin" made her the foremother of the modern drama about the African-American experience. The play snagged the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1959, the year it opened on Broadway. Hansberry was the youngest and the first black writer to receive the honor.

"I think it is a universal story of hope," said Bellamy of the play's long life.

"It's the story of a dream deferred, and all of us have dreams, all of us have infinite possibilities. It's a travesty when society doesn't tap that possibility. We all suffer from it."

In "Raisin," the son Walter has this dream of what he should do. He is ill-equipped to realize it, but still he dreams. As do his sister, who wants to be a doctor, and his mother, who wants to live in a secure neighborhood. While it takes place in the '50s, the issues and sentiments move beyond that time.

"This production — and I've seen several productions — is a very special production," said Bellamy of ATC's "Raisin," a co-production with The Cleveland Play House and the company Bellamy founded, the Penumbra Theatre Company.

"It's got a vibrancy and a vitality that speaks to the now. It doesn't feel like a history piece. It's got the reality of the time, but the conversation and the banter and philosophical discussion is right now."

It was the immediacy of the play that persuaded ATC's artistic director, David Ira Goldstein, to pick this as the second in the company's five plays in its Great American Play series. The first was last season's production of "To Kill a Mockingbird."

" 'Raisin's' themes and the examination of what it means to be a family are completely universal," said Goldstein. "It is among the great line of family plays that started with Eugene O'Neill and goes right on through to 'August: Osage County.' The economic issues resonate with great cogency with what's going on in our economy. The idea of home and place couldn't be more pertinent. This seems the right time and place to do it."