“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.
Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”
The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”
The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.
Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.
Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)
Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
