Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window review: Lorraine Hansberry's play remains a powerful call to action

Ever since Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at the too-young age of 34, her most famous achievement has been her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.

The heartbreaking dramatization of a Black family dealing with housing segregation in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun has been adapted into multiple media formats, revived multiple times on Broadway, taught in schools, and even regarded as one of the greatest American plays ever written.

But though Hansberry's artistic legacy has lived on in other ways (such as inspiring Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black"), not everyone may realize that she actually wrote and completed one other full-length work before her premature death. That play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, has now been given an extraordinary production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater, directed by Anne Kauffman.

While A Raisin in the Sun follows one family's personal struggle with institutional racism, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window explores whether electoral politics can provide a meaningful solution to such societal ills. Set in the "bohemian" milieu of Greenwich Village where Hansberry herself lived in the '50s and '60s, the play opens with the titular character buying a local newspaper (a clear stand-in for The Village Voice) following the closure of his failed restaurant. Sidney is played by Oscar Isaac, and the role allows him to showcase the full range of talents that made him such an exhilarating actor before getting swallowed up in years of Star Wars movies and other mega-franchise commitments. It's his best performance in years.

In fact, Isaac's work in The Sign Sidney Brustein's Window often seems to be in conversation with his breakthrough performance in the Coen brothers' 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis, which was also set in the Village in the same era. One of the shocks of the Coens' film was that, despite the integral role of folk music in the protest movements of the '60s, Llewyn Davis himself was stridently apolitical (to the point that his eyes glazed over when a union leader asked if he subscribed to a certain political faction). Sidney starts out in a similar spot, proclaiming "the death of the exclamation point" and declaring that under his leadership the paper will not "exhort anybody about anything."

So when Sidney's friend Wally O'Hara (Andy Grotelueschen) declares a run for local political office in opposition to the dominant political machine, Sidney initially brushes him off. He'd rather play the banjo while his wife, aspiring actress Iris (Rachel Brosnahan), dances a multi-ethnic jig. In fact, Sidney's greatest wish is to escape the confines of city life and live amongst nature; he even named his failed restaurant Walden Pond.

But their radical biracial friend Alton Scales (Julian De Niro) chides him for admiring "the wrong parts of Thoreau" — after all, the author of Walden was also an influential supporter of John Brown's abolitionist insurrection against the slaveholding South. Wally eventually persuades Sidney to support him by saying that he wants to help marginalized people like Willie Johnson, a Black kid who worked as a busboy at Walden Pond before dying of a drug overdose, "have a real chance in this city." That activates the formerly uncaring entrepreneur. Sidney uses the paper to endorse Wally's run, while putting up the titular sign in his window calling for "an end to Boss-ism."

But not everyone is as convinced as he is. Iris desperately wants to "make it" as an actress, but often finds herself too overcome with anxiety to even show up for auditions. In order to square that circle, she slowly starts to back away from her husband's newfound political passion and reconnect with her married sister Mavis' (Miriam Silverman) more genteel social circles in search of powerful industry connections.

As with Isaac, Brosnahan's performance here creates an interesting dialogue with her most famous role. While the marvelous Midge Maisel starts as a typical housewife and evolves into an edgy artist, Iris moves backward from the artistic fringes into a replica of mainstream WASP femininity — symbolized by a stunning physical transformation in the second act.

Sidney and Iris' upstairs neighbor is a gay playwright named David (Glenn Fitzgerald) — an interesting creation by Hansberry, who was closeted for much of her life and whose lesbian love letters were suppressed by her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff for almost 50 years after her death. A writer of exclusively existentialist works, David doesn't see anything of use in politics — and why would he, when even a radical like Alton is virulently homophobic?

But the play's various small-group political conversations are written by Hansberry and staged by Kauffman so that viewers can notice unexpected overlaps that remain invisible to the characters themselves. Despite Alton's disgust at David's "queer" lifestyle, his growing resentment at the privileged social liberalism of Sidney and Iris ("you don't care if I'm blue, green purple, or polka-dot…but those don't happen to be the options") sounds remarkably similar to David's own pushback: "You accept queers, because you accept anything. But I am not anything." Even more surprisingly, David and Mavis — seemingly social opposites — dismiss electoral politics in similar terms: "What is the virtue of getting one boss out and putting another one in?"

These are all good indicators that not everyone is who they appear to be, which becomes all too clear after intermission. Just when Sidney can clap himself on the back for succeeding at something for once in his life, his world gets turned upside down. For awhile, the play indulges the catharsis of nihilism in the face of political defeat. That must have been very relatable for political radicals at the time, who had witnessed the Red Scare, blacklists, and other Cold War paranoia at the same time that the supposedly socialist Soviet Union had been unveiled as an oppressive regime of censorship and disappearances (at one point, Sidney describes Alton's disillusionment with communism as NMSS: No More Since Stalin).

Modern viewers of the play are certainly familiar with this feeling, having watched Americans rise up nationwide during the summer of 2020 to protest police power, only for most cities to increase police funding in the years since. But the play's climax convincingly demonstrates — through Hansberry's heartbreaking writing, Kauffman's psychedelic lighting, and Isaac's howling, shapeshifting performance — that it's always better to fight than to give up. Individualism taken to its alienated extreme can only lead to rot and life, no matter how painful and disappointing it can be, is always better than death.

Sometimes it's easy to look back on the political victories of the '60s and wish that we too lived in a time when the radical change of the civil rights movement or the antiwar movement seemed possible. There was energy in the air: "The world is about to crack down the middle," Sidney tells Mavis at one point. But in the wake of yet another way-too-warm winter, our own world feels like it's about to crack from the strain of climate change, pandemics, and other disasters. Things will only get worse if people don't stand together and fight for a better world. Decades after Hansberry's death, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window remains a powerful call to embrace that fight. This imaginatively-staged, passionately-acted production does justice to her political vision. A-

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