Now in a rare production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—the 1964 follow-up to Lorraine Hansberry’s now-iconic drama A Raisin in the Sun—is a sprawling, three-hour portrait of the diverse Greenwich Village bohemian scene that Hansberry knew so well.
It’s a look at a seemingly happy marriage that’s starting to show its cracks. It’s an even deeper look at two people, professional idealist Sidney (Oscar Isaac, recently seen in HBO’s Scenes From a Marriage) and waitress/dancer/actress Iris (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star Rachel Brosnahan in a role originated by Rita Moreno), struggling to define themselves not only as husband and wife but also as individuals. A study of a disenchanted intellectual who bounces from career to career—first a folk music nightclub called Walden Pond (can’t imagine why that failed), now an underground newspaper called the Village Crier—and from cause to cause, but shows the most passion when he’s bouncing around his apartment playing the banjo. A glimpse of an aspiring actress who doesn’t realize that she’s simply not talented—even though everyone around her knows and doesn’t have the heart to clue her in. An indictment of a proudly capital-P Progressive who’s too principled to endorse similarly politically aligned pal Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen) for local office, but has no qualms about making his wife—“the only living Oklahoma Greco-Gaelic-Indian hillbilly in captivity”—perform for him and his friends: “Do your dance, honey.”
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Truthfully, Sidney and Iris are not people you want to hang around with—let alone for three hours. Their friends don’t do much to sweeten the deal: Upstairs neighbor David (Glenn Fitzgerald) is a pretentious absurdist Edward Albee-esque playwright whose claim to fame is putting two characters in a refrigerator. Bookstore worker and former communist Alton (Julien De Niro)—who’s in love with Iris’ sister Gloria, purportedly a high-fashion model but actually a high-class hooker—is more tolerable, until he storms out on dinner with David because he can’t stand “hanging out with queers.” The most likable person to walk through the apartment door? Iris’ well-to-do married sister Mavis (Miriam Silverman, in a perfectly pitched performance), who calls Sidney & Co. out for what they are. “I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia. I was taught to believe that—creativity and great intelligence ought to make one expansive and understanding. That if ordinary people, among whom I have the sense at least to count myself, could not expect understanding from artists and—whatever it is that you are, Sidney—then where indeed might we look for it at all—in this quite dreadful world.” Later, we learn that she’s even smarter, and more resourceful, than she seems. “In this world there are two kinds of loneliness: with a man and without one,” Mavis explains. “I picked. And, let’s face it, I cannot type.”
Director Anne Kauffman, who also staged Sidney Brustein in 2016 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, does the absolute most possible with the script—by all accounts not quite finished by Hansberry, who succumbed to cancer at 34 shortly after the Broadway opening. And Isaac and Brosnahan—two insanely charismatic actors who make far-too-infrequent stage appearances—can’t be topped, especially considering the show’s crazy tonal shifts: The first act is essentially a potluck, and the second is an acid trip. The last few lines, however? Believe it or not—Uncle Vanya.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened Feb. 27, 2023, at BAM’s Harvey Theater and runs through March 23. Tickets and information: bam.org
