Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan Bring ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’ to BAM

In October of 1964, five years after A Raisin in the Sun made Lorraine Hansberry a leading figure in American letters, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened at New York’s Longacre Theatre. Fame had come fast for Hansberry, who was not yet 29 when she became, with Raisin, the first Black female playwright to have a show produced on Broadway. “The telephone has become a little strange thing with a life of its own,” she told a New Yorker interviewer after Raisin’s premiere in 1959, reacting to the rush of invitations and engagements that followed. If Hansberry’s first work had dramatized some of the racial prejudices she felt growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s, her second would tackle the political and social conflagrations of 1960s New York—where she’d moved as a 20-year-old college dropout the decade prior.

Centered on a gaggle of artists and writers in Greenwich Village, The Sign spoke directly to Hansberry’s Waverly Place milieu: a downtown cohort that included types who flirted with Communism; acolytes of “the abstractions flowing out of London or Paris”; and others who turned to “Zen, action painting, or even just Jack Kerouac,” as she described it in an essay published that fall. “The silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of some of my closest friends,” Hansberry wrote. It was the “climate and mood” of those types who “[constituted] the core” of The Sign.

In her 2018 biography, Looking for Lorraine, Imani Perry identified The Sign as Hansberry’s response to Another Country, her friend James Baldwin’s 1962 novel about “Village counterculture, queer sexuality, interracial intimacy.” Gathered around the play’s titular character—an entrepreneurial Jewish liberal who, besides being “a nervous, ulcerated, banjo-​making young man,” per Hansberry, was also a restless romantic and the recent owner-publisher-editor of a small weekly paper—were Iris, his fiery, aspiring-actress wife; their friend Alton, a white-passing Black Marxist who falls in love with Iris’s call girl sister Gloria; David, the gay playwright in the apartment upstairs; and Wally, a local politician who gains—and later betrays—Sidney’s trust and support. The play offered a slice of very specific life, following the group as they searched for meaning in the melee of the 1960s. (As Robert Nemiroff, a producer of *The Sign—*and Hansberry’s former husband—would put it in 1965, “The very day the play opened, Khrushchev fell from power in Russia, the Conservative Party fell in England, and the Chinese set off their atom bomb; where such events can occupy 24 hours, what power can a single man feel over the shaping of his destiny?”) It would be the final play that Hansberry saw produced; by the time it premiered, the playwright was 34 and already dying from pancreatic cancer, tended to primarily by Nemiroff and her older lover, a woman named Dorothy Secules.

The play’s initial critical reception was mixed. The shagginess of the script—which Hansberry had become too ill to properly revise—wasn’t lost on reviewers: “There are, in brief, many good things scattered through The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times. “But the truth must be faced that Miss Hansberry’s play lacks concision and cohesion.” Others objected to its tone. But what most seemed to be asking, directly or indirectly, was how this play—about (mostly) white people butting heads with one another and themselves—could come from the same woman who authored A Raisin in the Sun, that perfect jewel of a story about a Black Chicago family dreaming of a better life.

A scrappy fundraising effort marshaled by Nemiroff, his producing partners, and well-wishers such as Shelley Winters, Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks, and Baldwin kept The Sign on through the holidays, generating just enough buzz to make it a minor hit. But after Hansberry died, on the morning of January 12, 1965, the show went dark for good.

Now, after nearly 60 years, several rounds of revisions, and two successful recent stagings—at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2014 and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2016—The Sign’s first major New York production since its original run is due to open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Thea­ter this February, led by Oscar Isaac as Sidney and Rachel Brosnahan as Iris.