NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- A few weeks after “A Raisin in the Sun” opened in New York in March 1959, making 29-year-old Lorraine Hansberry the first black woman with a play produced on Broadway, a reporter for The New York Post asked what other projects she had in the works. For “Raisin,” she had drawn on her family’s battle to buy a house in a segregated white neighborhood in Chicago; for her next play, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, she wanted to consider the progress and setbacks of an earlier era.

Hansberry told the reporter that she was writing an adaptation of “The Marrow of Tradition,” a long out-of-print novel by Charles W. Chesnutt about a massacre that destroyed black rights gained after the Civil War, based on a rarely acknowledged white supremacist coup that overthrew the multiracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. Chesnutt visited Wilmington to research his novel; published in 1901 and not reprinted until 1969, it was one of the few book-length accounts of the massacre.

“If I finish it, it won’t be Chesnutt at all, but me,” Hansberry said. “But I hope to feature him somehow with my dramatization and make people wonder who the hell was this Negro doing all this writing before the turn of the century.”

Sixty years later, a scholar’s research promises to bring renewed attention to the unpublished script and its centrality to Hansberry’s radical vision of violence in American history.

Though the play has never been performed, Hansberry left over 300 pages of drafts for “Marrow: A Play in Three Acts, based on themes and characters from ‘The Marrow of Tradition’ by Charles W. Chesnutt; 1901.”

Stephanie Browner, the general editor of the coming Oxford Complete Works of Chesnutt, spent a year sorting through the “Marrow” files in Hansberry’s papers at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The earliest draft is dated 1955; a decade later, when Hansberry died of cancer at 34, “Marrow” still appeared on her list of plays to finish.

She told The New York Times in 1962 that she suffered from “first draft-itis,” pivoting from one version to another, “depending on what’s cooking inside.”

Browner, dean of the Eugene Lang College at the New School, tracked every revision as Hansberry worked toward a final version.

“We don’t understand Hansberry until we understand that she was reading Chesnutt, reading W.E.B. Du Bois, reading political history,” Browner said recently. By writing about an 1898 coup that effectively ended Reconstruction, she added, Hansberry was “undoing a false story about post-Civil War America.”

Soyica Colbert, a Georgetown University scholar whose intellectual biography of Hansberry will be published next year, said the script helps to underline the playwright’s “radical and vast interests” beyond her “Raisin,” which is widely taught in classrooms and has been presented on Broadway three times, most recently starring Denzel Washington.

“Her exploration in ‘Marrow’ is part of a larger history about her wrangling with questions around crisis and historical change,” Colbert said.

It’s taken a while for audiences to catch up with Hansberry’s story of America. Besides “Raisin,” she only had one other play produced in her lifetime: “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a study of Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals trying to find political purpose. It puzzled critics expecting another drama of black family life and closed the night she died, in January 1965. Yet she wrote at least four other plays — all of which, except “Marrow,” have since been published.

“My perspective is that we should take what she’s done, even if she didn’t deem it finished,” said Imani Perry, a Princeton University professor and the author of “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.” “She was so prolific. There’s a lot that doesn’t have the final period put on it.”

Five years after Hansberry’s death, her longtime partner and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, put together a complete version of “Les Blancs,” set in an African colony fighting for independence. Its internal debates between assimilationists and revolutionaries anticipated rifts within the black power and decolonization movements that roiled the late-1960s; James Earl Jones starred in the 1970 premiere.

Another script that Nemiroff later published, Hansberry’s television play “The Drinking Gourd,” proved too far ahead of its time. In 1959, NBC planned a series of programs to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War, and Hansberry, fresh off the success of “Raisin,” was commissioned to write the first episode: a 90-minute drama about slavery.

Her script eviscerated romantic “Gone With the Wind”-style portraits of slave life, showing a black man blinded for learning to read and a white master who can’t recognize his own complicity in the slave system’s violence. NBC executives put it in a drawer and never produced it. Realistic depictions of slavery didn’t start to appear on American television until “Roots,” in the late 1970s.

“Maybe after ‘The Drinking Gourd,’ Nemiroff thought audiences weren’t ready for ‘Marrow,’” Colbert suggested.

The unpublished script shows the playwright grappling with a question that feels nearly as pressing in 2020 as it did in 1959 or 1901: what to do when white supremacist violence threatens black lives. In Hansberry’s script, as in Chesnutt’s novel, North Carolina’s white elite turns the white working class against black allies through racist propaganda, rousing a lynch mob after a black servant is falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman.

At the end of the play, while a band plays “Dixie,” the mob is set to burn down the black-run school, newspaper and hospital. (In the 1898 Wilmington coup, dozens of black residents were murdered or driven out of town, and the new government soon eliminated black voting rights.)

In one of the play’s most fraught scenes, a cross-section of the black community — a doctor, an editor, a reverend and a dockworker — debate how to prevent this looming violence. Fight back? Flee to a nearby swamp? Beseech white leaders to intervene?

The editor holds little hope of stopping bloodshed. “Power in the south is still what it always was,” he says. “The Negro centered in the middle of an armed camp, waiting for the federal government to intercede on his behalf.”

Perry sees moments like this as evidence of Hansberry’s radicalism, far from the optimistic vision often ascribed to “Raisin.” Hansberry watched her father pursue legal remedies for the real estate agreements that enforced segregation in Chicago, and yet her family still faced violence, even after the Supreme Court ruled in her father’s favor.

“Her point is that even if you do it the right and respectable way, that’s no protection,” Perry said.

The “Marrow” script builds to the moral crisis of a wealthy white woman, the wife of one of the coup’s architects, who learns that half their property is rightfully owed to her half sister, the product of her father’s legal marriage to a black woman during Reconstruction.

Will the wife’s realization be enough to change an unequal system? Can she muster the psychological strength to challenge the race privilege from which she benefits?

Hansberry’s stage directions for “Marrow” frame these questions in spatial terms. The set is divided between the white sister’s house on one side of the stage and the black sister’s home on the other. Only slowly do we realize that the familiar domestic interior both masks and reveals the roots of violence in the home: sexual, political, economic.

Behind the outlines of the homes, we can glimpse a swamp, a reminder of people excluded from polite society. Departing from Chesnutt, Hansberry begins her play with “an old and demented Negro beggar woman” emerging from the swamp, who, we later learn, was driven to insanity after the Ku Klux Klan murdered her husband. Breaking the realist frame, she approaches the audience with an alms-basket and sings a spiritual with a haunting refrain: “Oh, my Lord, oh, my Lord, what shall I do!”

It’s a question that lingers throughout the play, a challenge to the audience as well as its characters. Browner pointed out that the beggar woman becomes bound up in a mix of imitation, desire, and violence that crosses lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. A white bachelor who mimics the beggar woman also flirts with a black male servant, all while courting a white heiress whose relatives are concealing an interracial marriage.

“It’s murky, difficult territory,” Perry said. “When Hansberry confronts queerness, she also winds up confronting other secreted parts of social relations. It’s never a single axis.”

Perry’s “Looking for Lorraine” has helped to draw attention to Hansberry — who had relationships with women and wrote lesbian fiction under a pseudonym — as a queer pioneer. She said that “Marrow,” begun around the time that Hansberry’s friend James Baldwin composed “Giovanni’s Room,” “potentially changes what we might think of as the timeline for black queer studies.”

“It’s pretty remarkable how little criticism about her work has picked up on queer desire,” Perry said. “I’m excited that Stephanie is doing this work and noting that. The time is right.”

What might become of the “Marrow” script? Joi Gresham, the executor of the Hansberry estate, expressed excitement about developing Hansberry’s unproduced plays; she recently worked with the National Theater in London on a new version of “Les Blancs.”

She remembers Chesnutt’s novel positioned prominently in Hansberry’s study, next to a bust of Einstein and the collected works of Sean O’Casey, Hansberry’s favorite playwright.

“It was always there as a source of inspiration,” Gresham said. “We’re coming to understand its impact.”

© 2020 The New York Times Company