A Raisin in the Sun has more stage directions than a typical play (these are in italics). How do these directions add to your understanding of the play. Give specific examples from the text.

Throughout the play, A Raisin in the Sun, there is more stage directions than a typical play. I believe there is many reason as to why. One of them being, in the stage directions I can tell a lot about the person by their body language and there is things stated in the stage directions that I wouldn't be able to know if they weren't written. This example can be shown in page 51, "MAMA absorbs this speech, studies her daughter and rises slowly and crosses to BENEATHEA and slaps her powerfully across the face. After, there is only silence and the daughter drops her eyes from her mother's face, and MAMA is very tall before her." In these stage directions, I can tell that even though Beneathea is a grown woman, her mother still can correct her mistakes. The fact that Mama is very tall before her, helps us understand that Beneathea still listens to her mother and accepts the way she corrected her. Even though the stage directions in the example were short compared to the others in the book, the screenwriter still got that point across. She needed stage directions to show this because it would be very confusing and the reader wouldn't be able to understand the way the characters are. Finally, the stage directions allow for us, as the readers, to image the characters and understand how they react to certain things. In this play the extra stage directions were very helpful and necessary.