A windfall of promise

IF you can’t get to Broadway, Broadway will come to you. On Monday, ABC airs “A Raisin in the Sun,” a three-hour movie starring most of the Tony Award-winning cast of the 2004 Broadway hit, including Sean Combs. Such stage-to-small-screen events were once fairly common; now they are rare enough to be billed as “A World Premiere Movie Event.” But in this case, the power and significance of the story – written by Lorraine Hansberry, it was, in 1959, the first time a play by an African American woman appeared on Broadway – and the talent of the cast make the rhetoric accurate and appropriate.

Its title taken from Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” (What happens to a dream deferred / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”), “Raisin” is the portrait of a family on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s. As the matriarch, Lena (Phylicia Rashad), awaits a $10,000 life insurance check, her family plans for a new life that includes moving from their cramped tenement to a house in a white neighborhood. As Walter (a role made famous by Sidney Poitier), Combs plays a chauffeur longing to be his own man while his wife (Audra McDonald) dreams of leaving a life of domestic service.

The 2004 revival was the critically acclaimed Broadway debut of Combs and won Tonys for Rashad and McDonald, all of whom appear in the ABC movie. Though “Raisin” has been adapted several times, for film and television, it remains a classic American play and a compelling reminder of the necessity of hope, and the possibility of change.

(ABC, Mon., 8 p.m.)

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Mary McNamara