Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Bring Hansberry Play to Broadway

The current Broadway season is getting a surprise ending: Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will bring to America’s most visible theater district their take on a long-overlooked Lorraine Hansberry play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”

The starry duo — he’s best known for the “Star Wars” sequels and she’s the title character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — led a production of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that closed on March 24. Now they plan an unexpected and unusually quick transfer uptown: The show will start previews April 25 and open just two days later, on April 27, which is the final date on which plays and musicals can open and still be eligible for this year’s Tony Awards.

“Who would’ve thunk it?” said the play’s director, Anne Kauffman. “It’s completely insane — the speed with which these producers are acting is nuts and completely admirable.”

Kauffman first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and previously staged it in Chicago. “I have to say, because I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about this play for so many years, it has all felt like a hallucination, and I think the hallucination is continuing,” she said. “Nothing has sunk in — it just feels like it’s beyond my wildest dreams for the play.”

“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which followed the enormous success of “A Raisin in the Sun,” is about a left-leaning couple (played by Isaac and Brosnahan) living in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and facing challenges to both their marriage and their political ideals. Hansberry, then 34, died in 1965, just two days after the original “Brustein” production closed on Broadway, and the play has long been overshadowed by “Raisin.”

The revival received mixed reviews. “The play was, and remains, as brilliant and pugnacious a punch against liberal inertia as any thrown in real life,” the critic Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times. “What it isn’t, quite, is coherent.”

No matter: Audiences flocked to BAM, where the seven-week run, in the 836-seat Harvey Theater, was 98 percent sold out, according to BAM’s outgoing artistic director David Binder, who also has a long history with the play and with Hansberry’s work — he produced the first Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

The Broadway transfer was made possible by the collapse of another show, “Room,” which was scheduled to open this month, but fell apart when the producers were unable to raise the necessary capitalization costs. The Hansberry play will be staged at the James Earl Jones Theater, where the “Room” marquee had already been erected.

The fact that the BAM run just ended makes the transfer simpler — the cast is still in the play’s “mind-set,” Kauffman said. Some parts of the physical set, however, had already been discarded, and will have to be reconstituted, she said, but otherwise the cast and the physical production are directly transferring, with some minor adjustments to the staging because the Broadway house is less deep than the BAM space. There will be just two days of rehearsals in a rehearsal room, followed by a tech period in the theater; Kauffman said she expects “a tweak here and there,” but no major changes.

The Broadway run will be short — it is scheduled to last just 10 weeks. It will be produced by Seaview, a company led by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that is also producing this season’s Broadway revival of “Parade”; Sue Wagner and John Johnson, longtime general managers who also worked with Seaview on this season’s Mike Birbiglia show, “The Old Man & the Pool”; the playwright Jeremy O. Harris; and BAM.