Those of us who’ve sat through Sophocles set in a Dublin housing project or Shakespeare relocated to Fascist Italy or Blairite Britain are familiar with the standard defense: the specifics of time and place, clothes and furniture aren’t important; what’s enduring is the author’s immortal insights into human nature. The revival of A Raisin in the Sun (at the Royale) upends the argument. Here is a play from the day before yesterday—1959—in which the exterior appearances—the costumes and props —are instantly recognizable, and yet the underlying human impulses might as well come from another planet.

Lorraine Hansberry took her title from “Harlem,” Langston Hughes’s famous poem of 1931:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Miss Hansberry applied the question to a black household in 1950s Chicago, trying to work their way up and out of a cramped tenement and into a home in the suburbs, small business, college education, the professions and beyond. It’s a nuclear family that’s either gonna blow or just shrivel up. A Raisin in the Sun was the first Broadway play by a black woman, and Brooks Atkinson hailed it as “a Negro Cherry Orchard.” It’s truer to say Raisin did for the straight play