THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong, Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 24, $84.50-$385
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

One of the first things you will ask yourself after seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is, Why haven’t I ever seen or read this before? Or even, Why have I never heard of it until now?

Hansberry changed theater forever with her 1959 masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. Five years later, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, debuted on Broadway, starring Gabriel Dell as the title character and Rita Moreno as his wife, Iris. It ran for 14 previews and 101 performances; the last New York City revival was more than fifty years ago, playing nine previews and a paltry five performances at the Longacre, with Hal Linden as Brustein and Zohra Lampert as Iris. Whereas Raisin dealt with a Black family struggling to survive on the South Side of Chicago following the death of its patriarch, Sign is about a white couple in Greenwich Village trying to maintain their Bohemian lifestyle; racism and discrimination are only subplots to the central narrative.

The provocative play is now back in a stellar production at BAM’s Harvey Theater that continues through March 24 and stars Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac as Sidney, a New York City Jewish intellectual, and Rachel Brosnahan as his non-Jewish wife, Iris; the story is built around Sidney’s efforts to make a living and the travails of his friends and his wife’s family.

When the play opens, his latest business venture, a folk music café called Walden Pond, has failed, so he immediately decides to buy the local newspaper the Village Crier. The deal annoys Iris, a wannabe actress he has nicknamed Mountain Girl because of her Appalachian upbringing. “Where in the world are you going to get the money to pay for a newspaper?” a bewildered Iris asks. “It’s a small newspaper. A weekly,” Sidney explains. “Sidney, you can’t afford a yearly leaflet!” Iris declares.

Joining Sidney at the newspaper are his right-hand man, Alton Scales (Julian De Niro), and artist and designer Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), who has contempt for revolutionaries like Alton.

Sidney is a former idealist who no longer believes that he can save the world. “Since I was eighteen I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve, and Conserve that ever was,” he tells Alton, who is a light-skinned Black man, and his friend Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a bushy haired white man running for local office as a reformer. Sidney goes on, “And the result — is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all cost to gain control of — the refreshment committee!”

Sidney calls Iris’s older sister, the bigoted and fashionable Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “the Bulwark of the Republic. The Mother Middleclass itself standing there revealed in all her towering courage.” Mavis responds, “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia,” blaming people such as Sidney for society’s ills, declaring, “Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

Alton has fallen in love with Gloria (Gus Birney), Mavis and Iris’s younger sister, who works as a call girl in Miami, although Alton doesn’t know that. Because Mavis had difficulty accepting Iris’s marriage to a Jew, Iris and Sidney decide not to tell Mavis about Alton, assuming she’ll not respond well to the possibility of a Black brother-in-law, either. Meanwhile, gay playwright David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), who lives upstairs from the Brusteins, occasionally drops by for some writing supplies or just to say hello and shake things up.

And things do indeed get shaken up immediately before and after the primary.

Obie-winning director Anne Kaufman (The Bedwetter, The Nether) gives Hansberry’s sharp dialogue and clever character development the room they need to breathe and grow, avoiding clichéd situations and stereotypes. The action unfurls on dots’ multifloor set, which is propped up from beneath as if it is floating in a mysterious space, a cramped Village apartment with a fire escape outside one window and a rooftop view. John Torres’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound maintain the believability of it all.

Isaac (Hamlet, Grace) is sensational as Sidney, completely immersing himself in this complex and unpredictable man who essentially wants to do the right things for the right reasons, who feels he is part of a bigger community that needs people like him. Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Othello) is a delight as Iris, who is ready to flower but is constantly thwarted. Silverman (Anatomy of a Suicide, A Delicate Ship) nearly steals every scene she’s in, representing how too many Americans feel toward people who are not like them but also how they are not innately evil and, perhaps, willing to adjust their views. Tony nominee Grotelueschen (Tootsie, Into the Woods) continues to prove he’s one of the best supporting players around as the politician seeking a newspaper endorsement. Birney brings a sweet innocence to Gloria, Fitzgerald is bold as the cocky David, De Niro is gentle as Alton, and Nash Thompson has a rousing good time as Max.

But at the center of it all, a daring humanity emanates from every moment. The play was inspired by a real election in Hansberry’s district in the Village; the Chicago native lived on Bleecker St. for many years prior to her death in 1965 at the age of thirty-four. BAM supplements the show with the biographical exhibit “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder” in the Rudin Family Gallery, consisting of photos, unpublished writings, recordings, drawings, Alison Saar’s sculpture To Sit a While, and more, lending insight into the playwright’s real life.

Theatergoers and critics might have been disappointed that The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window didn’t address racism directly like Raisin did as they tried to pigeonhole the Black woman writer, but her sophomore play has plenty to say about the human condition, and perhaps she was aware that the work would not be as successful as her first hit. About halfway through, Sidney and David have a key conversation in which Hansberry seems to be defending herself in David’s words.

Sidney: Tell me. What is your play about, David?
David: It’s not for me to say.
Sidney: Each person will “get from it what he brings to it?” Right?
David: To be real simple-minded about it — yes.
Sidney: Then, what makes you the artist and the audience the consumer if they have to write your play for you?
David: I know what it’s about. I told you, my plays have to speak for themselves.
Sidney: But to whom? For whom are they written and, above all, why are they written?
David: You hate my kind of writing because it goes beyond the walls of Ibsen’s prisons and Shaw’s lectures — that’s your problem, Sid.
Mavis: I just don’t know whatever happened to simple plays about simple people with simple problems.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Lorraine Hansberry and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.