A play for all people PlaTspeaks for the blacks I " 1 - V ' ' - x- i hV . t v. ' ' ' . I ' c f "-V ' '" : t V K ' ' ' V - v " ' i '. : r f i - - it. v , . y I i J l "r V'',t 111 S ' ' ' Bernard Ward and Tina Sattin are among the players who bring life to the world of playwright Lorraine Hansberry in the play, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," on stage Thursday, at 8 p.m. in Kingsbury Hall as part of the Contemporary Issues series. The play is an autobiography of Hansberry. l want to reach a little closer to the world, which is to say to people and see if we can share some illuminations together about each other. This was the wish of Lorraine Hansberry. "To Be Young Gifted and Black," is a play about her. It is the story, told in her own words, of what life is, for a playwright who is young, is a woman and is black. In 1959, her first play, "A Raisin in the Sun," made her at 29 the youngest American, the fifth woman and the only black dramatist to receive the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. This play is being presented Thursday at 8 p.m. in Kingsbury Hall as part of the University's Contemporary Issues series. The play, unique in conception, utilizes an interracial cast of seven, all of whom-men and women, black and white in turn portray Miss Hansberry, the people who most affected her and the characters she created. The production is contemporary in form, a kaleidoscope of constantly con-stantly shifting moods and images that moves from childhood memories to the years of creation and triumph, ever deepening involvement in-volvement in the black movement, and death. During her short life (she died of cancer when she was 34) Miss Hansberry grew continually more involved in the blacks' fight for freedom. Her first lesson came in the middle of the depression. Her mother sent her to kindergarten in white fur a rich girl where she was. She learned from the ghetto children. When there was a race riot at school and she and her other "rich" colored friends stood around amused and did nothing, the ghetto kids fought, they had pride. She never forgot, THEY had fought back. Her first play, "A Raisin in the Sun," was her way of bringing on gorgeous black knight-without-armor into the twentieth century. She was beginning to feel herself a revolutionary. But there were other subjects besides the black cause, Indians and the nuclear threat and she was concerned with them all. "I do not hate all white men but I do desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier. But I've seen too many slums in this world white and black, American and otherwise to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever loved the white race either," she said. Toward the end of her life she had helped judge the entrants in the United Negro College Fund writing contest. She once told three of the winners, "though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so doubly dynamic to be young, gifted and black."