‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’ Review: The Sin of Apathy

It’s hard to imagine how someone dying of cancer could write, as Lorraine Hansberry did in a hospital journal, that “comfort has come to be its own corruption.” Despite her condition, she thought she should be on the front lines again, resisting decline and fighting injustice.

But actually, she’d never stopped doing those things. “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in October 1964 and closed the following January, two days before her death at 34, is proof. An indictment of what one of its characters calls “ostrich-ism” — “the great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men” — the play was, and remains, as brilliant and pugnacious a punch against liberal inertia as any thrown in real life.

What it isn’t, quite, is coherent, as the revival that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music makes clear in making just some of it work. Its hailstorm of ideas remains stunning — and aptly painful if, as a proud progressive, you’re struck in the face by the ice of its wit. But as human drama goes, and despite fine performances by Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, it’s hard to discern a satisfying emotional shape in all the weather. It’s blurry.

That might seem surprising, coming from the author of the almost translucently earnest “A Raisin in the Sun,” which five years before “Sidney” was the first play by a Black woman ever produced on Broadway. The follow-up, rarely seen onstage since its premiere, takes a much broader, and often satirical, view of the problem of living right in a world that’s wrong.

The focus of the satire is Isaac’s character, Sidney Brustein, a progressive Jew who progresses from failure to failure. His ludicrous nightclub, called Walden Pond, has just gone under as the action starts in the cramped Village apartment he shares with his wife, Iris. And now, to her chagrin, he’s finagled himself the ownership of a neighborhood newspaper.

But The Village Crier, as it’s called, is no Village Voice. Disappointed in politics and convinced that his editorial stance should thus be apolitical, Sidney refuses to endorse anything. At the start of the play, he won’t even hang a sign in his window for Wally O’Hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a reform candidate for local office. Reformers, experience tells him, eventually turn into the bosses they’ve unseated.

Aligned in various ways against that cynical view are his friends (all men) and his kin (all women). Alton Scales (Julian De Niro) is the most passionately anti-apathy; in part because he’s biracial, justice is no abstraction to him. “You don’t care if I’m ‘blue, green, purple or polka-dot,’ right?” he observes. But “those don’t happen to be the options.”

Also maintaining the struggle against the status quo are Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), a beatnik artist who designs the newspaper’s perversely inscrutable cover, and David Ragin (Glenn Fitzgerald), a gay playwright in the Edward Albee mode whose latest work takes place in a refrigerator. David is engaged “in the supreme effort of trying to wrest the theater from the stranglehold of Ibsenesque naturalism,” Sidney mocks.

Anne Kauffman’s production, following one she directed in 2016 for the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is engaged in a similar effort. Especially in its treatment of the play’s women — three sisters representing three different maladaptations to male expectation — her staging moves the story toward its surreal edges in an attempt to give breathing room to Hansberry’s complexities.

The approach is successful at first. Brosnahan hits all the right notes as Iris, a would-be actress whose quasi-mystical Appalachian upbringing constitutes an important part of the Brustein marriage’s erotics. (Sidney calls Iris, who is Greek, Irish and Cherokee, his “mountain girl.”) Brosnahan is also compelling when Iris’s autonomous ambitions emerge, and the domestic comedy (along with the lighting by John Torres) turns stranger.

But as the contrasting energies that joined the Brusteins — Jew and gentile, sophisticate and bumpkin — begin to go haywire, Isaac, otherwise deft and charming, cannot find a way to merge Sidney’s laissez-faire liberalism with his period-typical yet vile sexism.

And it’s not just Sidney who’s the oppressor; all the men are vile that way. “A woman’s place is in the oven,” one character jests.

Nor is Iris the only victim: Her two sisters are belittled as well. Gloria (Gus Birney), who says she’s a model, is the object of salacious speculation and then cruel disdain. Mavis (Miriam Silverman), an uptown matron, is roundly jibed as a dopey square. True, she’s racist and antisemitic, but Hansberry allows the character humanity nonetheless — and Silverman, demonstrating that “everybody is his own hipster,” steals every scene she’s in.

You might have guessed that what’s under attack here is the patriarchy; Hansberry rewrote what she at first called “The Sign in Jenny Reed’s Window” so she could make the point more fully.

And if the atavism of progressive men were her only target, however complicated and ornately she painted it, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” might land with a more satisfying thwack. But with so many other bull’s-eyes to aim at — political machines, Bohemian pretensions, the ethics of sex work and the false equivalencies of Black and Jewish despair — the play too often feels overwhelmed with itself. Kauffman literalizes that feeling during the production’s second half by having some characters leave the set — a multilevel marvel by the design collective dots — to watch the action as if they were part of an exhausted audience.

Despite that touch of whimsy, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is no surreal “refrigerator”; it’s an old-fashioned, Ibsenesque oven, working best when allowed to cook the original recipe. Perhaps that’s why the period-nailing costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo are so successful. So too is the period music, much of it specified by Hansberry, some of it played live by Isaac on banjo.

But Hansberry was too sick during the original production’s rehearsal period to make revisions that might have accommodated the vastness of her vision to the clutter of her structure. And though Robert Nemiroff, her ex-husband and literary executor, did make revisions later, and the creative team of this revival has made additional ones as well, a satisfactory solution has not yet been found.

Perhaps it’s a problem built into Hansberry’s point. The progressive slicing of identity into finer and finer factions eventually leaves you with factions of one. No traditional play, with its sofa and sink and succession of neat scenes, can house that story, at least not in three hours. If only Hansberry had lived (she’d be 92 now) to turn her tantalizing version of the “well made” drama into what it might have been: a great unmade one.

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
Through March 24 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 3 hours.