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Review: ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,’ Uneven Yet a Powerful Draw

by Eliana Willis 5 May 2023, 14:00

Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan revisit Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play on Broadway, following its sold-out run in Brooklyn.Lorraine Hansberry didn’t have the luxury of getting “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” right. In October 1964, days after the play opened on Broadway, a headline appeared in The New York Times: “Lorraine Hansberry Ill, Placed on Critical List.”She had been hospitalized before rehearsals started, but released in time to attend some of them. She saw previews; she attended opening night. Within two days, she was an inpatient again.A week later, another article: “Revisions Are Made in ‘Sidney Brustein,’” telling of “extensive script changes since its opening.”Then, on Jan. 13, 1965, a report of Hansberry’s death the previous day, from cancer, at age 34. “She was unable to help fashion the last play as it took shape in rehearsals,” the obituary read.All of which surely helps to explain the unwieldiness of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a play that we might have looked back on as an early effort if only Hansberry had lived.Revised further by her ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, after her death, it has returned to Broadway, at the James Earl Jones Theater, with Oscar Isaac in the title role of a bloviating, early ’60s Greenwich Village intellectual. Rachel Brosnahan plays his wife, Iris, an actress manqué whose greatest feat of performance has been shaping herself into what he wants her to be.The leads’ considerable box-office appeal — Isaac perhaps most widely known for his role in the “Star Wars” sequels, Brosnahan for playing the title character in the Amazon series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — made Anne Kauffman’s production a scorching-hot ticket earlier this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Rapidly transferring to Broadway, it opened last week on the final day of Tony Awards eligibility, while asking critics to stay away until this week. (I did not catch it in Brooklyn.)From left: Julian De Niro, Andy Grotelueschen, Brosnahan and Isaac as Village bohemians in Anne Kauffman’s production, a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet this seldom-seen play itself is a powerful draw. Clamorous with the voices of men, who take up an awful lot of oxygen, it is most incisive and piercing in the voices of its women, whom Hansberry draws with exquisite fullness. As a piece of theatrical and cultural history it is fascinating. And despite some sluggish moments, it does not feel overlong at two hours and 40 minutes, trimmed from three hours at BAM.The script’s unevenness does make you wonder, though, how Hansberry might have reworked it if she’d had the energy, and the privilege of time — and to what degree she, a Black woman and closeted lesbian in the very white, very male, ostensibly straight world of midcentury American theater, felt pressure to conform in her playmaking.Because really? Sidney Brustein, whom she has placed at the center of this crowded tragicomedy, is not an interesting person. This is not Isaac’s fault, although he ignores Hansberry’s stipulation that Sidney “laughs at himself as much as the world.” Isaac’s performance is mostly unremarkable but fine, sparking fully to life only in Sidney’s scenes with Iris’s wealthy, conventional sister, Mavis — the best role in the show, and the best played, by a thoroughly captivating Miriam Silverman. (The play is a Tony nominee for best revival; Silverman is its only acting nominee.)As written, Sidney is ridiculous, and stubbornly oblivious to that fact. Terrible at business, he has just bought a local newsweekly without mentioning it to Iris, because theirs is nowhere near a marriage of equals. The title nods to that: It’s Sidney’s window, not Iris’s too, even though it is in their living room. (The set, framed by girders reaching up toward the sky, is a suitably impressive Broadway debut from the design collective dots, lately omnipresent Off Broadway.)Sidney finds a smidgen of purpose when he agrees to back his politician friend Wally (Andy Grotelueschen), and puts a campaign sign in the window, advocating reform. Mostly, though, he is a man of thought, not action. Blusteringly self-important, he flails through life, naïve and directionless and pontificating nonetheless.“I know it’s hard for you, Iris, to understand what I’m all about,” he says near the top of the show, but already the audience has his number. The line gets a giant laugh.Iris, on the other hand, whom Sidney does not take seriously as an artist or an adult, knows exactly what her ambition is — and it no longer involves pretending to embody his particular pastoral romantic fantasy. Iris, imbued by Brosnahan with a fragile strength and perfect comic timing, works as a waitress while scheming to break into the theater.“I am 29,” she says, “and I want to begin to know that when I die more than ten or a hundred people will know the difference. I want to make it, Sid.”Brosnahan with Miriam Silverman, who plays Iris’s wealthy, conventional sister, Mavis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIsaac with Gus Birney, who plays Iris’s younger sister, a baby-voiced Gloria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a Hansberry play, it pays to keep your eye on the women. “A Raisin in the Sun” is as much about the female characters as it is about Walter Lee Younger. Similarly, you could shift the kaleidoscope just a bit and see “Sidney Brustein” as being principally about Iris and her sisters, Mavis and Gloria (a terrific Gus Birney, all baby-voiced dignity) — with a supporting role for young Alton (Julian De Niro), a rare Black character in this largely white play, who is in love with Gloria.The matronly Mavis, everyday elegant in delectable period style (costumes are by Brenda Abbandandolo), is bigoted, complicated and startlingly wise about life. Gloria, a call girl who tells Alton that she’s a model, is a sweet open wound. And Alton emerges as more injured and more furious than he’d let on.There are other characters here — David (Glenn Fitzgerald), a gay playwright neighbor, and Max (Raphael Nash Thompson), a painter-revolutionary — and a swirl of social forces: racism, misogyny and homophobia among them. But the three sisters and Alton are the soul of “Sidney Brustein,” the ones who make its ending land so potently. They exist inside a work that’s crammed with people and ideas in the way that first plays often are, before writers learn to take their time.Hansberry didn’t have time. If she had, I like to think that she’d have cracked “Sidney Brustein” open and done some recycling, making more plays about Iris and her sisters and their friend.The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s WindowThrough July 2 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; thesignonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Bring Hansberry Play to Broadway
by Eliana Willis 4 April 2023, 12:01
The duo recently starred in a revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at BAM; now the production is moving uptown.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. More
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The New Black Canon: Books, Plays and Poems That Everyone Should Know
by Eliana Willis 7 March 2023, 16:00
A guide to some of the undervalued 20th-century works that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive.Fifty years ago, when college courses in Black American literature were rare; when Zora Neale Hurston’s novels were out of print and Toni Morrison was a book editor with one novel to her name, the job of shaping a Black canon was clear: Rediscover, anthologize, define the terms of a tradition. “The act of recovery means something different now,” says Kenton Rambsy, an associate professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington, whose research uses data analytics to tell new stories about the Black literary past. Sometimes recovery demands peering into the shadows cast by towering canonical figures. “It might mean finding that writer who is just being overlooked because of the canonicity of, say, Toni Morrison,” Rambsy says. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “We don’t have to go deep into archives to find undervalued Black authors,” says the poet and U.C.L.A. English professor Harryette Mullen. In a recent essay, I look to such undervalued authors and works as the impetus for shaping a new Black canon.What follows is a list of 20 books — works of fiction, drama and poetry, presented chronologically by category — that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive. You’ll encounter many of these works as recent reissues; others remain difficult to find or are out of print entirely. All were published last century. Their writers are genre fiction authors and experimentalists, nature poets and satirists, pulp fiction practitioners and trans-nationalists, writers of the weird, the quirky, the unsettled and unsettling. Together, they help to tell a story of Black American literature that reflects the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.FictionPauline E. Hopkins, “Of One Blood” (1902-3)In Telassar, a thriving city hidden below the Nubian Desert, Hopkins’s protagonist, the biracial Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, encounters an advanced civilization with “specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days.” This sprawling work of speculative fiction resists paraphrase, but what’s important is that it helped spawn a vast contemporary tradition: “I like to say [this book] was ‘Black Panther’ before ‘Black Panther’, ” says Eve Dunbar, a professor of English at Vassar College. “It’s got something for everyone: Black sci-fi, a passing narrative, a back-to-Africa plot, and a plantation ghost story.” Hopkins published “Of One Blood” in serialized form in the pages of the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, which she edited. Embedded in her novel’s title is Hopkins’s rejection of the pseudoscientific conflation of race with blood, a myth used to buttress white supremacy and racial division.Chester Himes, “Lonely Crusade” (1947)A first edition cover of Chester Himes’s 1947 novel, “Lonely Crusade.”A 1946 portrait of Himes by Carl Van Vechten.Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityHimes’s revival in recent years has come on the strength of his noir crime fiction. Starting with 1957’s “A Rage in Harlem,” he wrote eight books that follow detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones through the New York underworld of the 1950s and ’60s. Himes knew something of crime and punishment himself, having served nearly eight years in prison for armed robbery. His body of work, though, defies tidy categorization. After emigrating to France in the mid-50s (he lived in Europe until his death in 1984), Himes wrote perceptively about the Black expatriate experience. He also wrote about Black-white labor movements, same-sex relationships, interracial marriage and racism. “Few African American writers had his sure-handed ability to depict the nitty-gritty of Black life,” Himes’s biographer Lawrence P. Jackson says. Jackson points to “Lonely Crusade” as “his classic text.” For evidence, he cites a passage in which Himes’s protagonist Lee Gordon listens to his father, not knowing it will be for the last time: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t let nobody tell you no different. Now all you got to do is prove it.” Himes takes readers into Lee’s mind as he ponders how his father intended those words — “whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.”Fran Ross, “Oreo” (1974)Ross’s only novel was lightly reviewed and largely overlooked. “Perhaps a book like ‘Oreo’ — though I know few — gets ignored or quite purposefully sidelined because it defies the reader, the reviewer, the cultural critic, the scholar and just about anyone else who dares position it,” the novelist Michelle Latiolais recently wrote. “Oreo” is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman. (Ross herself described it as “cockeyed and nutty.”) The narrative action, such as it is, concerns a young biracial Black and Jewish protagonist’s search for her father. Most remarkable, though, is the novel’s mode of address. In 2015, the novelist Danzy Senna described the book as “a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past.” As the literary critic Scott Saul points out, though, the novel is also very much of its time. “Oreo,” he writes, “is a queer novel, written by a gay woman who, while she traveled in gay circles and revered queer writers like James Baldwin and Djuna Barnes, opted not to disclose that side of her identity when she made her literary debut.”Alison Mills Newman, “Francisco” (1974)Alison Mills Newman began her creative life as an actor. Her credits include a recurring role on the late-’60s NBC sitcom “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, a groundbreaking series that portrayed everyday Black life during a time of national tumult. Soon thereafter, in her early 20s, Mills Newman wrote her first novel, “Francisco,” which chronicles a young Black woman’s love affair with an independent filmmaker. In her foreword to a 2023 reissue (the book, long out of print, was originally published in 1974 by R. C. & J., an independent press founded by the writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson), the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes it as being in the style of a Künstlerroman: “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself.” The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. Writing of “Francisco,” the novelist William Demby observed that it’s “the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s — a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.”James Alan McPherson, “Elbow Room” (1977)“There never was a nationwide coalition that looked unwaveringly at Black storytelling,” the cultural historian Wil Haygood tells me. Haygood — who’s written biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall — understands the responsibility of telling Black American stories on the page and onscreen, not only in the United States, but around the globe. “You have a world market from Japan to Australia to France that has access to streaming services and wants to see Black stories,” Haygood says. That storytelling necessarily involves engaging history-shaping social and political movements: the civil rights struggle, the Black Power era, the recent uprisings for racial justice. But Haygood is also drawn to quieter, though no less radical stories, found in the fiction of the Black quotidian. He particularly likes this collection of restrained, elegant stories that find high drama among ordinary people. You should read McPherson’s stories, Haygood says, “because the Black characters do things that the outside world doesn’t think that they’d ordinarily be doing, like listening to and falling in love with country music.”William Demby, “Love Story Black” (1978)“By some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement,” writes the scholar Nathan A. Scott Jr. in his foreword to the 1991 reissue of Demby’s second novel, “The Catacombs” (1965), “the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves.” More than thirty years after Scott wrote those words and nearly ten years after Demby’s death at 90, the canon may finally be catching up to Demby. An international conference in 2018 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a recent issue of the literary journal African American Review, both dedicated to his work, provide evidence. His third novel, “Love Story Black,” is at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd. Asked to describe Demby, the writer Ishmael Reed, his near contemporary and a professor at California College of the Arts, put it plainly: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”J. California Cooper, “The Wake of the Wind” (1998)Cooper’s dedication to “Wake,” her saga of slavery and freedom, says it plain: “I WILL NEVER BE ASHAMED OF MY ANCESTORS. IF YOU ARE … YOU ARE A FOOL.” In scope (it begins, “Once upon a certain year, 1764 or so, 200 years ago”), and in story (the book opens in Texas with two enslaved people falling in love, ignorant of the fact that the Civil War has brought slavery to an end), “Wake” is the perfect book to celebrate Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday. Though some critics have called Cooper preachy, many readers find her inspiring and profound. “Cooper always writes about love. This [book] is steeped in the power of family love, one of the things that no one could ever take away from Black folks,” the novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke says.DramaJean Toomer, “Balo” (1922)A circa 1925 portrait of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionThis year marks the 100th anniversary of “Cane” (1923), Toomer’s generically mutable masterpiece of fiction, poetry and drama. His one-act play “Balo,” written the previous year and staged by the Howard University Repertory Company during its 1923-24 season, is no masterpiece. However, its imperfections (most notably its tortured dialect) show a young writer endeavoring to capture his experience of unfamiliar places and voices. Both works are set in Georgia, where Toomer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., spent several weeks during the fall of 1921, on a trip to visit the birthplace of his estranged father. The play follows a day in the life of a Black sharecropper and his family, living amid the ruins of an old plantation, alongside a poor white family who reside in a decaying slave mansion. Whereas “Cane” often bends toward tragedy, “Balo” chooses reverie: “AUTUMN DAWN,” the opening stage directions read. “Any week day. Outside, it is damp and dewy, and the fog, resting upon the tops of pine trees, looks like fantastic cotton bolls about to be picked by the early morning fingers of the sun.”Eulalie Spence, “The Starter” (1923)Déja Denise Green and SJ Hannah in a scene from Eulalie Spence’s “The Starter” (1923), one of three plays in “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City through March 12.Kat duPont VecchioForgoing propagandistic “problem plays,” Spence modeled a style of politically and humanly engaged Black theater that paved the way for Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and their contemporaries. After emigrating as a child from the Caribbean island of Nevis to New York in 1902, Spence absorbed the speech patterns of her adopted community and gave them expression in plays written in one act, to meet the requirements of the contests to which she often submitted her work. In “The Starter,” Spence stages a comic tale of courtship written in an eye dialect that calls out for gifted actors to make stilted symbols into natural speech: “Y’know, kid, I bin thinkin’ — Say, why don’t we get married? Huh?” asks T. J. of his beloved, Georgia. “Ah dunno, ’cept yuh never mentioned it befo’, ” Georgia replies. To appreciate these lines, one must hear them performed onstage. Fortunately, “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” a production of three of Spence’s plays (including “The Starter”), is running through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York. The director, Timothy Johnson, says he enjoys how “in this one-act form she’s able to give you a whole life. … There’s such vibrant specificity about these characters that makes ordinary people extraordinary.”Lorraine Hansberry, “Toussaint” (1961)Above: Lorraine Hansberry in a 1961 clip from the series “Playwright at Work” discussing her play-in-progress, “Toussaint.”“A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered on Broadway in 1959, is a work of such canonical consensus that it risks subsuming its creator. It marked the commercial and critical high point of a career cut short by illness. In her literary afterlife, Hansberry “becomes boxed into ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in a way, which is both to her benefit and to her detriment,” explains Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of the 2021 Hansberry biography “Radical Vision.” “Raisin” remains an indispensable work; reading beyond it, however, one discovers the politically radical, formally experimental writer that Hansberry was becoming. In “Toussaint,” a completed 1961 scene from her play in progress about the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hansberry claims her identity as, in Colbert’s words, a “freedom writer.” In critiquing the legacy of colonialism and understanding that this, too, is part of the Black American story, Hansberry offers an animating insight for her time and for ours.Charles Gordone, “No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy” (1969)The playbill from the 1969 Broadway production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place To Be Somebody.”© PlaybillIn 1969, Amiri Baraka (publishing as LeRoi Jones) released “Four Black Revolutionary Plays,” a series of one-acts obsessively, at times brilliantly, circling Black-white racial conflict. That same year, Gordone’s “No Place” debuted Off Broadway. The two works embody a fundamental tension: Baraka’s favors confrontation while Gordone’s displays a humanistic impulse to see dignity even in seeming degradation. Gordone peoples his play with pimps, prostitutes and hustlers, both Black and white. As Phyl Garland wrote in Ebony, Gordone “came equipped with a loaded pistol and a whole barrel of ‘MF’s’. ” Debuting at the Public Theater, founded by the towering New York theater figure Joseph Papp (a student of Eulalie Spence at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School in the 1930s), “No Place” earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970, becoming the first work by a Black playwright to do so. “No Place” blends comedy, tragedy and melodrama. In doing so, it shares with then-emergent Blaxploitation cinema a revolutionary sensibility that seeks not to counter Black stereotypes but rather to annex them, revealing the complexity beneath their distorting masks.Adrienne Kennedy, “An Evening with Dead Essex” (1973)The cast of “Ohio State Murders,” which was first published in 1991 and debuted on Broadway just last year, pays tribute to its playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, in December 2022.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesKennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (1991), which made its belated Broadway debut last December, closed early, on Jan. 15, after just 44 performances. In a video posted to Instagram, the play’s star, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, paid tribute to Kennedy. “More of her work deserves to be produced commercially,” the actor said, “and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about … how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is.” Kennedy’s career spans seven decades, beginning with “Funnyhouse of the Negro” in 1964. Her style is often described as surrealist — a central quality, but only a part of her varied aesthetic. Among the most striking of her early plays is “An Evening with Dead Essex,” first performed in 1973 at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play joins documentary with imagination: It concerns the factual account of a Black Vietnam vet named Mark Essex who returns from war and commits a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring more before being shot by police. The play takes place in a film production studio, with Kennedy insisting that “actors use their real names and the director should get the actors to play themselves.” The action consists of the actors and filmmakers, all but one of whom are Black, reconstruing Essex’s life so as to make some sense of the violence of his death — and of the violence that surrounds us all.Andrea Hairston, “Lonely Stardust” (1998)In the stage directions to “Lonely Stardust,” Hairston describes how she wants her audience to relate to her play. “The Audience,” she writes, “should be embedded in a corner of this galactic wonder. … Occasionally comets whiz by. Periodic showers of Stardust should be arranged. The Traveler has journeyed billions of miles and landed in Springfield, MA, USA. …” Through this asymmetry of scale — the cosmos and a town in western Massachusetts — Hairston opens up points of entry into the everyday and the ineffable. A nameless traveler, searching for life at the end of his own, speaks in a hip vernacular: “When you spiral down that image of lonely, there’s the beginning. Or the end, actually. Buggin’ out.” Sheree Renée Thomas, author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including the short-story collection “Nine Bar Blues” (2020), sees Hairston as the too-often overlooked link between her generation and that of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. “Andrea Hairston has had her pulse on the science fiction community since the 1970s,” Thomas says. “She was always in that liminal space with her work: too Black for the science fiction community, and too science fiction for the Black drama community.”POETRYEsther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934)Esther Popel’s poem “Flag Salute” on the cover of the November 1940 issue of The Crisis.Dickinson College Archives & Special CollectionsIn November 1940, a little more than a year before the United States entered World War II, The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reprinted Popel’s “Flag Salute” on its cover. Popel’s poem intersperses phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of a Black man’s lynching. When it first appeared six years earlier, the poem was responding directly to the Oct. 18, 1933, murder of George Armwood, a 27-year-old Black farm laborer from Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had been arrested for “grabbing the arm” of a white woman on a public road. “Flag Salute” was newly relevant in 1940, The Crisis editors noted, because of the fact “that the federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in the Senate and that Negro Americans would be segregated and discriminated against in the U. S. armed forces.” Embodying the ambivalence of being both Black and American, Popel’s poem communicated across decades with Harryette Mullen, whose poems “Waving the Flag” and “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” bear its influence. “Popel was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Mullen says, “where she lived near my great-grandmother, although I can’t be certain they were acquainted.” Reading Mullen’s poems beside Popel’s is a form of acquaintance, too.Bob Kaufman, “The Collected Poems” (1965-78)“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.” These three lines conclude Kaufman’s 19-line poem “Dolorous Echo,” first published in his book “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness” (1965) and now included in the remarkable 2019 edition of Kaufman’s collected poems. The lines have proved prophetic. Kaufman died in 1986 at 60, in his adoptive city of San Francisco (he was born and raised in New Orleans), after struggling for decades with mental illness, addiction, arrests and housing precarity. A careful poetic craftsman, he could nonetheless be a reckless steward of his own work, scrawling poems in the narrow margins of newspapers, reciting words in coffee shops and at house parties. A founding member of Beatitude, the seminal Beat periodical, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and others, Kaufman is sometimes shorthanded as the “Black Beat.” While he helped define the Beat aesthetic, Kaufman was also a surrealist, a poet of blues and jazz and a spiritualist (he practiced Buddhism). “Kaufman’s poems use the most far out and surreal tools to render frighteningly honest, terrifying and delicious portraits of people and the world,” the poet Danez Smith tells me.Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca” (1968)A 1960 portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks on the back steps of her home in Chicago.Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesBy some measures, Brooks is about as canonical as it gets. Her poem “We Real Cool” (1960) is a high school staple, likely because its brevity lends itself to classroom reading and because its sharp enjambments invite close analysis of form. “Most young people know me only by that poem,” Brooks once told an audience. “I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I had written a few other poems.” Among Brooks’s many other poems, her long sequence “In the Mecca,” featured in a collection of the same name, is among her finest. Released in 1968, after a nearly decade-long publishing hiatus and just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “In the Mecca” is both intimately focused on domestic life and urgently engaged in the politics of the moment. The poet Major Jackson, who this year will publish a collection spanning his own two-decade career, says that the poem “reads like a contemporary ballad, where one discerns Brooks’s gift for incisive and stark language as well as a sweeping social vision married to modernist sensibilities.”Ishmael Reed, “A Secretary to the Spirits” (1978)A first edition cover of Ishmael Reed’s 1978 poetry collection “A Secretary to the Spirits,” illustrated by the artist Betye Saar.Betye Saar’s original cover illustration “A Secretary to the Spirits (from the series ‘A Secretary to the Spirits [for Ishmael Reed]’)” (1975).© Betye Saar. The Morgan Library & Museum, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los AngelesThe richness of the 85-year-old Reed’s ever-expanding catalog (from his 1967 debut novel “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” to his play “The Conductor,” which premieres at New York’s Theater for the New City on March 9) is such that one might overlook the slender 17-poem, 42-page volume he published 45 years ago with NOK, a Nigerian publisher. Julian Lucas, who has written often about Reed, considers “A Secretary to the Spirits” to be “criminally underrated.” The book is long out of print and difficult to find; all of the poems, however, are available in Reed’s “New and Collected Poems” (2007). But if you’re lucky enough to find a copy of the 1978 original, you’ll experience them as Reed intended, in call-and-response with illustrations by the Black Arts Movement assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar’s full-page panels depict Egyptian motifs juxtaposed with the Cream of Wheat chef, dancing Jazz Age silhouettes beside the Eye of Providence. Reed’s poems are sly and confrontational. In “The Reactionary Poet,” he claims that title in opposition to self-styled revolutionaries whose orthodoxy chokes out creativity and joy. He writes: “In your world of / Tomorrow Humor / Will be locked up and / the key thrown away / The public address system / Will pound out headaches / All day.”Dolores Kendrick, “The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women” (1989)“The Women of Plums” is theater living inside poetry. Kendrick understood as much, adapting her collection for the stage, where it won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. She writes in dialect, but not in the caricatured deez and doze of the minstrel stage; instead, much as Toni Morrison did two years earlier in “Beloved,” she employs shifts in syntax, rhythm and diction to render speech that lives beyond the page. Kendrick wrote the poems as a kind of alternative history of the United States, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, in the voices of 34 enslaved Black women. These voices are so strong that they have even been adapted as an opera, which opened in New York in the spring of 1995. “Soon I’ll go for a stroll / in my blue silk dress, / go into town / and buy myself a plum, / the blackest from the bush,” one of her speakers proclaims.Melvin Dixon, “Love’s Instruments” (1995)Dixon, a novelist, poet and scholar, published only one poetry collection in his lifetime, “Change of Territory” (1983). A posthumous collection, “Love’s Instruments,” released three years after his death at 42, is a playful and poignant tribute to the lives of gay Black men. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon uses line breaks to generate a syncopated rhythm that unfolds a narrative of regularity and revelation. This is how it begins:Work out. Ten laps.Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.Hard nodes. Beware.Test blood. Count cells.Reds thin. Whites low.Just months before Dixon died of complications related to AIDS, in 1992, he addressed the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in Boston. He warned his fellow writers to “guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives” and to claim responsibility for the future of literature. “I come to you bearing witness of a broken heart,” Dixon said. “I come to you bearing witness to a broken body — but a witness to an unbroken spirit.”Ai, “Vice: New and Selected Poems” (1999)Born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas in 1947, Ai chose a name that means “love” in Japanese, one of several lineages that the mixed-race poet could claim. Ai was part of a generation of post-Black Arts Movement figures who now occupy canonical places: Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen chief among them. Though Ai, who died in 2010, achieved distinction during her lifetime — she was the first Black recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, for “Vice” in 1999 — she is less well-known today. None of her poems appear in the major anthologies of African American and American literature. Perhaps that should change: Ai is among the pre-eminent practitioners of the dramatic monologue — a persona-driven mode of poetic address exemplified in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning. “I want to take the narrative ‘persona’ poem as far as I can,” Ai said. “All the way or nothing.” In “Vice,” she does just that, inhabiting the persona of a Black woman in love and trouble, writing past respectability to the hard truths of lived experience. More
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‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’ Review: The Sin of Apathy
by Eliana Willis 28 February 2023, 00:00
Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan star as Village bohemians in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s indictment of liberal inertia.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.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.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.”Village bohemians: Isaac, center, with Julian De Niro, left, and Raphael Nash Thompson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso 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.From left: Miriam Silverman, Isaac and Glenn Fitzgerald in the play, with period-nailing costumes by Brenda Abbandandolo.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou 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 WindowThrough March 24 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More
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Oscar Isaac, Rachel Brosnahan and the Draw of a Neglected Hansberry Play
by Aurelia Butler 1 February 2023, 09:00
The first major New York revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 Broadway play, comes to BAM this month. What took so long?Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” began performances on Broadway in the fall of 1964. It closed the following January, days before Hansberry’s death, having run 101 performances.It was hardly a flop. The reviews were generally admiring, and the support of the theater community, who rallied to keep the show going, was unstinting. Of the new plays that opened that fall, only a few ran so long. But unlike “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry’s earlier Broadway show, which remains a staple of regional theaters and high school classrooms, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” has been occluded, all but forgotten.“Isn’t that insane?” the director Anne Kauffman asked.This was on a recent afternoon in a rehearsal room of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Kauffman and her stars, the actors Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, were preparing for the play’s first major New York revival since a 14-performance run in 1972. Combining the published script with earlier drafts, Kauffman’s production is scheduled to begin performances on Saturday. She directed a revival of “Sign” at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in 2016. But she didn’t feel finished with it.Rita Moreno and Gabriel Dell as the play’s divided married couple in the 1964 Broadway production of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library“I loved that production. I really did,” she said. “But I had no idea what I was doing compared to the depths that we’re going to on this one.”A couple of days earlier, I’d watch a half-dozen actors, mostly off book, dip their toes in, negotiating a brisk scene that touched — sardonically, sincerely — on issues of race, gender and sexuality. The sign itself, a campaign poster for a local politician, had yet to be hung, which led to jokes: The Sign on Sidney Brustein’s Balcony, The Sign on Sidney Brustein’s Fire Escape. The actors navigated the scene’s particular rhythms and its many props: cigarettes, ashtrays, a fruit bowl, liquor bottles.“I don’t know where this will go,” Brosnahan, holding a glass, said.Kauffman responded: “That’s the fun of rehearsal.”“Sign” is set in Greenwich Village in 1964, territory more or less familiar to both Isaac (“Inside Llewyn Davis”) and Brosnahan (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”). Dedicated to “the committed everywhere,” the script moves between naturalism and a more heightened, poetic style. At its center is the fraught marriage between Sidney (Isaac), a small-business owner and onetime idealist, and Iris (Brosnahan), a would-be actress. All around them are the tumults of the time, which are also the tumults of our time, as each character measures the gulf between who they were, who they are and who they would like to become. In exploring Sidney’s allegiances, some of them misplaced, and Iris’s bid for self-determination, the play opens up questions of competing loyalties, identities and habits of mind.James Baldwin, who was Hansberry’s friend, described himself, in a speech that he gave to raise funds for it, as deeply moved by the play. “If it cannot survive then we are in trouble,” he said, “because it is about nothing less than our responsibility to ourselves and each other.”Why was the life of “Sign” so brief? “Very simply put, it’s not a play about Black people,” said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust and an adviser on this production. “She was seen as going out of her lane.”“I want people to be exposed to these words at this moment and to know Lorraine Hansberry in a different way,” said Anne Kauffman, seated on the couch. She directed a 2016 revival of “Sign” in Chicago but felt there was more to explore.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesOnly one character in “Sign” identifies as Black, which surprised white critics who had buttonholed Hansberry as a writer devoted to Black characters. They had expected another “A Raisin in the Sun,” and not a protest play about Village bohemians.All these decades later, the play can be understood as a prescient work about apathy, action and mutual aid. David Binder, the outgoing artistic director of BAM and a longtime champion of Hansberry’s oeuvre, sees it as a work whose time has come. “It’s a play about folks trying to do well in the world, in an incredibly turbulent time,” he said during a recent interview. “They’re trying to do right, personally, politically, socially. There’s never been a better time than now to do this play.”Isaac agreed. “I want it to feel very alive,” he said. This was on that recent Saturday afternoon. Isaac, curled, beside Brosnahan, into a corner of a prop sofa, with Kauffman just opposite. They had stayed after rehearsal to discuss commitment, change and the ways in which a nearly 60-year-old play can still surprise us. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Are you sign people? Are there signs that you hang in your own windows?OSCAR ISAAC My mom’s house is in Vero Beach. Trump country. During the election I put a bunch of Biden stickers on the golf carts.RACHEL BROSNAHAN My husband and I drove cross country in an RV in 2020. There was signage everywhere. Lawns filled with hundreds of Trump flags. I put a tiny Biden sticker in our window. It couldn’t be too big. We had to sleep there. If we did the play now it would be, “The Post on Sidney Brustein’s Instagram.” It’s all signs and not a lot of substance. You can hang a sign about anything. It’s maybe why I’ve always been a little bit allergic to signs.ISAAC Makes you feel like a hypocrite.BROSNAHAN But I go back and forth all the time. I sit on the board of a charitable organization, and I’ve learned how powerful it is to make a post on my Instagram. I guess the answer is you have to do both. You can say what you want, then you have to do it.What made you want to do this play?ISAAC It’s around the corner from where I live, a really easy sell. But I tried to get out of it. It’s nights. It’s a big commitment, energetically. I was like, ‘I’m going to read it just to make sure.’ I started reading the first pages. And I was like, ‘No, of course, I’m doing this.’ There’s something about the music of it. It’s undeniable. The draw is just too strong.Kauffman, center, with Isaac and Brosnahan. “It’s like this lost Bach piece,” Isaac said of the play, which begins preview performances in Brooklyn on Saturday. “People should hear this music.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesBROSNAHAN I had a similar experience. And it couldn’t be further from my house. I’ve spent the last 10 months shooting and really needed a break. But there is a magnetism to this play. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and dreaming about it.ISAAC It’s like this lost Bach piece. People should hear this music.Who is Sidney, and what does he believe in?ISAAC I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. He is a feeler and someone who’s trying to stop himself from feeling. He’s committed to a lot to things that haven’t panned out. So his hope has dried up. He has a very broad mind and a really keen aesthetic. He’s steeped in the culture of the moment and in the culture of the Village but it’s all starting to dissolve and change. There’s a wave coming — the civil rights movement, the psychedelic movement, Dylan plugging in. And at the heart is this relationship that’s also mutating and shifting. He can’t hold on to anything.Who is Iris?BROSNAHAN Iris is also a feeler. And a dreamer. But she doesn’t know how to achieve the dreams. She has a clear picture of what the dream is and no road map. She’s caught between two different waves of feminism. She’s caught between wanting to be cared for and wanting to take care of herself. When she entered into this relationship, she was really happy to be whatever he wanted her to be, to do whatever he wanted her to do, to go wherever he wanted. That was enough. But the world is changing, new conversations are happening. She is in a moment of tremendous change.The play is nearly 60 years old. What has surprised you about it?ISAAC The way she talks about identity, that feels eerily prophetic. What’s surprising to me is that this queer Black young woman, in the ’60s, wrote this play that has so much freedom. Every character has moments of extreme selfishness, ignorance and ugliness. Then, within a sentence, they say something that breaks your heart. You don’t see that kind of bravery these days.BROSNAHAN She gives each and every character the grace to be exactly who they are. She’s extraordinary. And so much of her extraordinary self is in this play. She could hold so many prophetic ideas in her head at once. We are revisiting a huge conversation right now about white apathy and the consequences of that in our political system and world. She explores that with such nuance in this play.Oscar, you mention identity. Sidney is Jewish as written and you were not raised Jewish. Does that make you feel any particular responsibility?ISAAC We could play that game: How Jewish are you? It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.Has the play made you reflect about your own commitments, your own beliefs?BROSNAHAN I’ve been very inspired by the play’s criticism of inaction. As someone who can be an absolutist, very all or nothing, it feels like a very hopeful and healthy reminder that you can do something, even something small, even something local. If that’s all you can do, that is enough. If we all do a little bit, we have the ability to make great change. Lorraine believed deeply in people’s ability to make change.ANNE KAUFFMAN Doing this play and having people come watch it and making sure that it’s accessible, that’s my mission. People need to hear her voice and they need to see this play.BROSNAHAN We need her in this moment.KAUFFMAN In every moment. We haven’t even caught up to her. The way that she thinks.What do you want the audience to experience?ISAAC I want it to feel very alive. I want it to feel like a happening.BROSNAHAN I want it to come off of the page. Hopefully people will consider where they do or don’t see themselves in this play and how that moves them.KAUFFMAN I want people to be exposed to these words at this moment and to know Lorraine Hansberry in a different way. I want to have this be part of the canon. This is not a well-made play. You come expecting to see a Lorraine Hansberry play and this colors way outside the lines. My goal is to let it be wild, not try to tame it. More
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Zadie Smith’s Play to Make Its New York Debut During BAM’s Spring Season
by Aurelia Butler 8 December 2022, 16:02
In addition to Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” the Academy will present its annual DanceAfrica festival and a music series curated by Solange Knowles.The Brooklyn Academy of Music gave a fuller picture of its spring season on Thursday, announcing the New York debut of the novelist Zadie Smith’s first play, “The Wife of Willesden,” and performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal. A revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s drama “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and a spring music series by the pop star Solange Knowles were announced earlier this fall.Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” adapted from the Wife of Bath’s tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales,” will arrive at BAM in April, after runs at the Kiln Theater in London, where it is currently onstage through Jan. 28, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., where it will receive its U.S. premiere in February. The play, set in an 18th-century London pub, centers on the Jamaican-born Alvita (Clare Perkins), who recounts a bawdy history of her five marriages to a group of strangers. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham, “The Wife of Willesden” celebrates the joys of storytelling, especially when you add alcohol, said David Binder, the Academy’s artistic director.“If you don’t know Chaucer, or if you have no reference of Chaucer, you would enjoy it just as much,” Binder said. “It’s hilarious. It’s joyful. It’s exuberant.”In February, a rare production of Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” will begin performances. The play, about two bohemian artists struggling to save their marriage, debuted on Broadway in 1964. The revival, starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who also directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.In March, Knowles, whose first ballet score was included in New York City Ballet’s Fall Fashion Gala in September, will curate a spring music series with her creative arts company Saint Heron. It will include a selection of films and live performances.The Academy will also present its yearly showcase of hip-hop and spoken word with “Word. Sound. Power.” in April, the 46th annual African dance festival DanceAfrica in May and a week of performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in June.The season will also mark the return of the popular BAMkids Film Festival, from Feb. 4-12, and, for the first time in six years, Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, from March 3-19. The company will present the U.S. premiere of Bausch’s “Água,” a piece incorporating the sounds, movements and music she encountered during a residency in Brazil in 2001. More
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Review: This Time, ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Really Does Explode
by Eliana Willis 26 October 2022, 02:30
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic ends on a note of cautious optimism. Its latest incarnation, at the Public Theater, does not.Leaving his recent “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” aside, Robert O’Hara doesn’t typically direct revivals; nor, leaving Shakespeare aside, does the Public Theater typically produce them. Yet on Tuesday the Public opened O’Hara’s take on Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: not merely a revival but a further “exploration” of an earlier production of a 1959 classic that is arguably as well known today as it was epochal when it debuted.How, then, to make it new? Apparently, on the evidence of this staging, by furiously underlining its subtleties and downplaying its conventional strengths, a reversal of standard procedure that produces a sometimes stunning, sometimes stunted result.It’s not as if the play needed help to feel relevant; like all great works it has proved itself incessantly timely. In telling the story of the Youngers, a Black family aiming to move from a “rat trap” tenement on Chicago’s South Side to a house in a working-class white neighborhood, it both reports on and anticipates the racist backlash to upward mobility that has been a blight on American life since Reconstruction. And in dramatizing the effects of that backlash on Walter Lee, the feckless dreamer of the family, it offers a piercing psychological portrait of Black manhood in distress.As was customary in her time, Hansberry prioritizes the real estate plot, wrapping Walter Lee’s personal drama (and that of his mother, wife, sister and son) in its ultimately hopeful arms. Beginning with the indignities of “ghetto-itus” — there are just two bedrooms for the three generations and a bathroom shared with neighbors down the hall — the play ends with them all moving out. Even the feeble houseplant, symbolically undernourished in the light-deprived apartment, is promised a new life.O’Hara signals from the start (and reiterates throughout) that he will flip the focus, at the same time broadening and darkening it. His production begins not, as written, with Ruth Younger (Mandi Masden) making breakfast, but with Walter Lee (Francois Battiste) carrying their sleeping son, Travis, from the dim recesses of the apartment to his bed on the living room sofa. It’s a haunting image that suggests the way the father’s hopes, and perhaps his failures, may be borne into the future — a future O’Hara and the scenic designer, Clint Ramos, literalize in a devastating coup de théâtre at the end.Francois Battiste as Walter Lee, right, with his son Toussaint Battiste as Travis, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by O’Hara’s interpretation of the role, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn between, no matter how judiciously Hansberry has distributed the play’s attention among the main characters — including the matriarch, Lena (Tonya Pinkins), and her daughter, Beneatha (Paige Gilbert) — O’Hara concentrates his prodigious theatrical imagination on Walter Lee.Battiste, among the most compelling stage actors today, has no difficulty filling the additional space created by that interpretation, making the character more alarming than usual but no less believable. Even when O’Hara has him step completely out of the frame of the play, turning what is already a horrifying speech (“O, yassuh boss! Yassssuh, Great white Father!”) into a brutal moment of minstrelsy, Battiste manages not to rip the skin of the role.But some of O’Hara’s other attempts to muscle in on Hansberry’s naturalism are less successful. Reaching not just forward but also backward along the family’s male line, he transfers some of the dialogue normally assigned to Lena to the ghost of her husband, who wanders atmospherically in and out of the action, looking unmoored. (The spectral lighting is by Alex Jainchill.) Also unmoored: a passage of postcoital pillow talk for Walter Lee and Ruth, created by turning dialogue that’s usually spoken live into a recorded voice-over. We hear the moans of their lovemaking too.Rather than creating the impression of buried fondness in their marriage, as it evidently means to do, the interpolation pushes the affection offstage. That’s a problem throughout. O’Hara directs most of the family scenes as overlapping free-for-alls, creating a generalized impression of dysfunction and very little of attachment. (Most of the funny and trenchant detail is lost in the noise.) At times I had the feeling that O’Hara, impatient with Hansberry’s occasionally laborious dramaturgy, had spun all the dials to the extreme right: volume, contrast, hue.Yet that was not the case in the earlier version of this revival seen at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2019. Led more equally by Battiste’s Walter Lee and S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lena, that “Raisin” was just as daring but less cartoonish. And though the current cast is very good generally, it’s noticeable that the comic material is handled most deftly, with standout performances from the piquant Gilbert and, as a nosy neighbor, Perri Gaffney.Gilbert as Beneatha and John Clay III as one of Beneatha’s suitors, the Nigerian idealist Joseph Asagai.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRather, the problem seems to be that O’Hara’s continued exploration has escaped Hansberry’s orbit, leaving some of the graver characters stranded in the thin air between her style and his. As Lena, Pinkins, ordinarily capable of astonishing depth and power, is largely hampered by too much directorial business, including the sudden onset of a ferocious palsy no one onstage seems to notice. And where the script famously has her slap her daughter for blasphemy, O’Hara has her go much further, leaving Beneatha flat on the floor.Despite his similar approach to the play overall, it never stays down for long. It can’t; it has too much internal energy and direction for any single misstep, including Hansberry’s, to throw the whole thing off track. Beneatha’s choice between two suitors — a preppy conformist (Mister Fitzgerald) and a Nigerian idealist (John Clay III) — is fully engaging no matter how creaky the setup is. And though the scene in which a representative of the Youngers’s new neighborhood (Jesse Pennington) comes to “welcome” them with veiled threats is very nearly twirling-mustache melodrama, it’s nevertheless one of the highlights of American theater.In that sense, O’Hara — who aside from his brilliant direction of contemporary works like “Slave Play” and “BLKS” is a mordant comic playwright himself — is right to reimagine the genre expectations of “Raisin.” It’s what we do with all classics, not because they require it but because they can handle it. And if his pessimism about American racism is somewhat at odds with Hansberry’s cautious optimism, well, he’s had 60 more years of history to support his point. That the play is so prescient does not mean that its story is over. It means that, sadly, it never is.A Raisin in the SunThrough Nov. 20 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More
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Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship
by Eliana Willis 14 October 2022, 17:36
The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More
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Lorraine Hansberry Statue to Be Unveiled in Times Square
by Eliana Willis 19 May 2022, 20:39
A life-size likeness of the pioneering playwright will be unveiled in June as part of a new initiative to honor her legacy.When the Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar was commissioned a little over four years ago to sculpt a statue of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she had just one thought: “Am I the right person for the job?”“I don’t really work with likenesses,” said Saar, 66, whose artwork focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. “But they said, ‘No, no, we want it to be more of a portrait of her passion and who she was beyond a playwright.’”The request had come from Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, as part of an initiative she was developing with Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lilly Awards, which recognize the work of women in theater. The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative was designed to honor Hansberry, who was the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway.“She’s just part of my foundational DNA as an artist,” Nottage said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Throughout my career, if I needed to look to structure, or storytelling, or inspiration, I could go to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ this perfect piece of literature.”The statue, a life-size likeness of Hansberry surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life, and, Saar said, invites people “to sit and think with her,” will be unveiled in Times Square on June 9. The event will include performances and remarks from Nottage and Hansberry’s 99-year-old older sister, Mamie Hansberry. It will remain in Times Square through June 12, and then begin a tour of the country over the next year or so on its way to its permanent home in Chicago, Hansberry’s birthplace.Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, the year she made history when she became the first Black woman to have a play reach Broadway. David Attie/Getty ImagesBut, Nottage said, they also wanted a more forward-looking way to honor Hansberry, leading to the initiative’s second prong: A scholarship to cover the living expenses for two female or nonbinary graduate student writers of color who create for the stage, television or film. Beginning next year, the $2.5 million scholarship fund will give its first recipients $25,000 per year, generally for up to three years — the typical length of a graduate program. (LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her role as Lena Younger in the 2014 Broadway revival of “Raisin,” the Dramatists Guild and the National Endowment for the Arts are among the initial donors.)“So many graduate programs for writers at elite institutions like Juilliard, Yale and Brown now offer free tuition,” Nottage said, “but you see people not taking a place because they can’t afford to take three years off to pay for rent, computers, food and travel, which could be, on average, anywhere from $15,000 to $35,000 per year.”“It would’ve made a huge difference for me,” Nottage said of the scholarship fund. “When I was at the Yale School of Drama, one of the actors told me I could get public assistance to pay for groceries and electricity, and when I showed the welfare department in New Haven my financial aid package — I was doing work-study — they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re living below the poverty line.’”Hansberry, who was just 34 when she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, is best known for “Raisin,” a semi-autobiographical family drama that tells the story of an African American family living under racial segregation on the South Side of Chicago. The play, which opened on Broadway in 1959 with Sidney Poitier in the cast, would go on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, making Hansberry, at 29, the youngest American and first Black recipient of the award.The life-size statue shows Hansberry holding a flame. It will be surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life and work. Nolwen Cifuentes for The New York TimesHansberry was also active in political and social movements, including the fight for civil rights, regularly writing articles about racial, economic and gender inequality for the Black newspaper Freedom. She also wrote letters signed “L.H.N.” or “L.N.” — for Lorraine Hansberry Nemiroff (her husband’s last name) — to The Ladder, a monthly national lesbian publication. In those letters, she wrestled with issues she faced as a lesbian in a heterosexual marriage and the pressure on some lesbians to conform to a more feminine dress code.Her older sister, Mamie, recalls Lorraine being bookish from a young age. Their parents allowed them to sit out on the sun porch during visits from prominent individuals, such as the poet Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and activist. “Daddy wanted us to be able to listen to some of the distinguished people who came by the house,” she said.Lorraine Hansberry would write letters to congressmen — “My mother would find them when she was cleaning her room,” Mamie Hansberry said. “She was free to write to anyone,” Mamie said, “and they would answer!”It is that spirit that Nottage and Jordan said they hope to cultivate in the next generation of playwrights. The statue’s tour will begin with stops at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (June 13-18) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (June 23-29) before traveling to cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles. It is also set to make stops at historically Black colleges and universities, including Spelman College in Atlanta and Howard University in Washington.Jordan said the initiative will also work with local theaters and artists to present Hansberry’s work, as well as the work of contemporary writers of color, in conjunction with the sculpture’s placement. New 42, the nonprofit organization behind the New Victory Theater, has also created a resource guide to teach middle- and high-school students about Hansberry and “Raisin,” which will be free for schools and organizations to use.“I do think that if Hansberry had continued to write and develop as an activist, one of the things she would’ve done was amplified voices of other women of color,” Nottage said.Jordan said she and Nottage had already raised $2.2 million of their $3.5 million goal for the statue construction costs, tour and scholarship fund. By 2025, Jordan said, they expect to support a total of six playwrights per year.“Everyone wants to produce these women,” Nottage said. “But we want to make sure people are prepared — that they’re secure in their voices and secure in their craft — so they don’t fail when they get that opportunity.” More

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