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Lorraine Hansberry did not win a Tony Award for A Raisin in the Sun, the first production by a Black woman to appear on Broadway. But her white ex-husband won a Tony Award for Best Musical fifteen years later, the sole producer of an adaptation that relied on the words Lorraine wrote. In his acceptance speech for Raisin, the bespectacled leftist nervously thanked, “My mother and my father […] who gave me a vision and a view of life in so many ways similar, out of the Yiddish shtetl, to Lorraine Hansberry’s Black view of life.” At the Tony Awards, he was announced as Robert Nemiroff. But Lorraine Hansberry always called him Bobby.

Quenna Lené Barrett and Paul Michael Thomson embark on a journey using archival research and experimental devising to begin writing the courtship, collaboration, and complicated legacy of Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff—one, a self-described Black lesbian from middle-class Chicago; the other, a white Jewish Communist, born to Russian immigrant parents. Bobby & Lorraine, or Something Left to Love is not quite biographical, not quite love story, but instead a fierce and incisive reimagining of the artistic, romantic, and political relationship between these two creators. It poses questions about the preservation and profit of Black-penned works by white producers, as well as the intimacy and ethics of artistic collaboration with those you love most.