The much heralded teaming of Denzel Washington and Diahann Carroll in the new Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” is not to be. The 78-year-old actress decided to withdraw from her role as Lena Younger, the matriarch in the 1959 Lorraine Hansberry classic, “due to the demands of the vigorous rehearsal schedule and the subsequent eight-performances-a-week playing schedule,” according to Philip Rinaldi, publicist for “Raisin.” She has been replaced by veteran stage performer LaTanya Richardson Jackson (“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”).
The announcement placed renewed focus on the subject of the respective ages of the actors in the revival, which was first brought up with the casting of Washington. The Oscar-winning actor is the box-office powerhouse behind this revival of a play that only 10 years ago had a successful Broadway run, starring Phylicia Rashad as Lena and Sean P. Combs as her ambitious son, Walter Lee Younger. At 59, Washington is decades older than Sidney Poitier was when, at 32, he created the role in the iconic 1959 production. Jackson, only five years Washington’s senior, will now play his mother.
When queried about the issue of age in a recent interview, Kenny Leon, who is directing the revival, said, “When I think about whom to cast in a production, I don’t ask myself, ‘How old are they?’ I ask, ‘Who is the best actor to play this role?’ Denzel has everything in him to draw on the character of Walter Lee. As an actor sometimes you play different ages, different parts of yourself. It’s what we call acting.”
Carroll, of “Julia” and “Dynasty” TV fame, was expected to bring a certain glamour to the role of Lena, originally created both onstage and in the subsequent 1961 film by Claudia McNeil, an imposing presence with gray hair and scale-tipping heft. Jackson may yet bring to the fore a more stylish Lena, as envisioned by Leon, in this tale about a black Chicago family whose members differ on how to spend a $10,000 insurance check. Walter wants to invest it in a liquor store; Lena in a house in the fictional white middle-class section of Chicago known as Clybourne Park.
As someone who has more recent stage credits than Carroll (last seen on Broadway in 1982 in “Agnes of God”), Jackson is unlikely to be tripped up by the demands of rehearsals or performances. But there’s no question that theater can be an exhausting exercise. That makes all the more impressive the continuing commitment of such octogenarians as Estelle Parsons, who at 86 is starring this season in “The Velocity of Autumn”; James Earl Jones, 83, who just finished an Australian tour of “Driving Miss Daisy”; and Angela Lansbury, 88, who was Jones’s co-star in “Daisy” and who is now prepping for her featured role in a West End production of “Blithe Spirit.”
The fact that the theater relies on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief makes it a more forgiving arena when it comes to age. Ethel Merman, at 58, recreated the title role in “Annie Get Your Gun,” playing opposite Bruce Yarnell as a romantic interest — he was 27 years her junior. Mary Martin flew around in the musical “Peter Pan” at 47. And in 1909, at the age of 65, Sarah Bernhardt famously played the 19-year-old Joan of Arc. As recounted in Elizabeth Silverthorne’s biography of the legendary French actress, in the course of the play the inquisitors would ask the Maid of Orleans how old she was. At this point, Bernhardt would slowly turn to face the audience and proudly declare, “Dix neuf!” (“Nineteen!”). The response was ecstatic.
