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Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

by Aurelia Butler 21 May 2023, 14:00

Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More

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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 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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Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan to Star in Hansberry Revival
by Eliana Willis 6 October 2022, 18:00
“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a rarely revived play by Lorraine Hansberry, will be presented at BAM starting in February.Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” starting in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The play, about a pair of bohemian artists struggling to preserve their marriage at a time of political upheaval, was first staged on Broadway in 1964, five years after the arrival of Hansberry’s far better known work, “A Raisin in the Sun.” In 2018, writing in The New York Times Book Review, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” “a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis” and declared the play “criminally neglected.”The revival, which is scheduled to begin performances Feb. 4 and to open Feb. 23, will be directed by Anne Kauffman, who previously directed it in 2016 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Reviewing that production for The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the play “a masterpiece lost in plain sight” and “a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours.”The artistic director of BAM, David Binder, said he read “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” while he was working as the lead producer of a 2004 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He and Kauffman have been talking about mounting a New York production ever since.Isaac and Brosnahan are best known for their work onscreen — he for “Star Wars” sequels (he played Poe Dameron) and she for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (she plays the title character). But both have stage credits as well; Isaac played Hamlet at the Public Theater in 2017, and Brosnahan played Desdemona in a production of “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop in 2016.Before the pandemic, Isaac had been planning to appear in a new production of “Three Sisters,” directed by Sam Gold at New York Theater Workshop. That production, which has been repeatedly postponed, now appears on the theater’s website as part of the current season, but with no date, and the note, “We are working hard to confirm the cast for the 2023 production of ‘Three Sisters’ and we hope that the full original cast will be available to continue on with the production.” (Representatives for Isaac and New York Theater Workshop offered no further details.)Hansberry died in 1965, at the age of 34, and in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work, with productions and books, a documentary and even a sculpture that is touring the country. A new revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara, is now in previews at the Public Theater. More
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‘Moon Knight’ Review: Marvel, Oscar Isaac and Identity Issues
by Aurelia Butler 29 March 2022, 15:27
Oscar Isaac multitasks in a Marvel series about a superhero who answers to an ancient Egyptian god and struggles with dissociative identity disorder.The hero of the new Marvel Comics series, “Moon Knight,” has a superior costume. It’s a cool, bullet-absorbing white suit with a billowing cape and eyeholes that shine like milky spotlights. It makes him look like a luminescent Batman. And he refuses to wear it.His wife, who has an abundance of common sense and very little patience, yells at him: “Summon the suit! Summon the suit!” But he just dithers or pouts or stares at her blankly while the bad guys close in.There could be a lot of things behind this costume avoidance, including a general move in Marvel’s television shows away from superhero business-as-usual and toward something with a little more, if you’ll excuse the phrase, psychological realism.With “Moon Knight,” which premieres Wednesday on Disney+, it also has to do with concept and casting. The show features a relatively minor Marvel hero, created in the 1970s, whose defining character trait is what is now known as dissociative identity disorder. In the four episodes (of six) available for review, he is most often Steven Grant, a mild-mannered clerk at the British Museum gift shop, and occasionally Marc Spector, a deadly former mercenary and earthly avatar of a justice-seeking Egyptian god.They are, of course, opposite halves of a symbolic whole: brains and brawn, peace and war. But the show generates most of its drama and humor, and a number of its visual effects, from their inability to coexist. Visible to one another as reflections, they bicker and trade insults, Steven abhorring Marc’s violence (even when violent action is called for) and Marc ruing what he sees as Steven’s weakness.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.As they try to stop a sanctimonious bad guy from resurrecting a rival Egyptian deity, enduring chases, desert treks and crunchingly violent battles, they grudgingly trade off possession of their shared body. The show’s favored move is for Steven to give in just in time for Marc to save both them and their archaeologist wife, Layla El-Faouly. But it takes the direst circumstances for the suit to be summoned, turning the human protagonist into the magically powered Moon Knight.And that’s where the casting comes in: reflecting Marvel’s ability to attract top-flight talent, Steven and Marc are played by Oscar Isaac, and who wants to wrap Oscar Isaac in C.G.I. mummy bandages, no matter how nifty they look?There are a lot of issues swimming around in “Moon Knight,” including its treatment of ancient Egyptian culture, its presentation of its Middle Eastern milieu and its depiction of its hero’s mental health issues. But as a drama, it’s built entirely around the Isaac vs. Isaac cage match, which supplies fair to middling action and sentiment and consistently satisfying laughs.The hero’s highly symbolic identities are visible to one another as reflections.Marvel StudiosIt’s characteristic of the Marvel Disney+ shows that the ability of the performers exceeds the inventiveness of the crew — writers and directors seem to be hired for competence rather than distinctive vision. Jeremy Slater (“The Umbrella Academy”), the show’s creator, and its director, Mohamed Diab (the Egyptian features “Cairo 678” and “Clash”), are only fitfully successful at combining psychological drama, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” desert adventure and superhero origin story.A little more flair would help paper over the cracks; as it is, events and relationships aren’t easy to parse and characters’ actions (especially Steven’s) can be inconsistent. It probably didn’t help that nine writers are credited on the six episodes.You also could wonder how much focus was spent on navigating the hazards of orientalism and ableism present in the original material. The credits include consultants for Egyptology, Judaism and mental health as well as three general consultants from a company that promises on its website to “flag potential concerns and provide advice on how to avoid or mitigate risk.” (No Islam consultant is listed; the focus on ancient Egypt mitigates the risk of dealing with the country’s predominant contemporary religion.)We don’t know what the consultants’ input was. But onscreen, presenting Cairo in a new light (in interviews, Diab has said this was a priority) seems to consist of making it look like every other world capital. A scene featuring Gaspard Ulliel, who died in January, uses what appears to be an Arab form of jousting as background exoticism; when the characters venture into ancient monuments and archaeological sites, the dangers they face are of a familiar silver-screen variety.None of that increases the viewer’s pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish it, either, and you can always focus on Isaac’s nervous fidgeting, shy stubbornness and dodgy accent in his scenes as Steven. (Convinced of his Britishness, Steven refers to Marc as “the little American man living inside me.”)And Isaac has heavyweight support: Ethan Hawke plays Harrow, the villain, and F. Murray Abraham is the voice of the god, Khonshu, an arrogant and self-righteous loudmouth who appears to his avatar as a disjointed skeleton topped by a floating ibis skull.The show’s best moments belong to Abraham, who delivers helpful advice like “Kill him! Break his windpipe!” in hilariously stentorian tones. But the character we like best is the highly capable Layla, who gets to be the action star while Steven and Marc snipe at each other; May Calamawy, who plays the rebellious sister in “Ramy,” gives Layla an appealingly irritated insouciance.The makers of the show are not unaware of the “Raiders” comparison — Steven watches a movie called “Tomb Buster” whose title is rendered in the same sloping style. And while it’s unfair to wish that every desert or jungle adventure could be directed by Steven Spielberg (or Robert Zemeckis, or J.J. Abrams), “Moon Knight” won’t stop you from doing so. More
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‘Big Gold Brick’ Review: Sad Sack Makes Good
by Aurelia Butler 24 February 2022, 11:00
Shaggy and dull, this film follows a slovenly writer who’s taken in by the man who hit him with a car.Samuel, a nice failed writer and slob, turns his life around one day by stepping in front of a car in “Big Gold Brick.” But success — a best-selling memoir — doesn’t happen overnight. First the wealthy driver, Floyd (Andy Garcia), takes in Samuel (Emory Cohen) as his in-house biographer, and a movie’s worth of mostly domestic misadventures follow that are shaggy and dull.Addled from the collision, Samuel bumbles his way around Floyd’s family: a coldly flirtatious wife (Megan Fox) who might as well be introduced with the “Oh Yeah” song, a sweet grown daughter (Lucy Hale) devoid of personality, and a sociopathic son, Eddie (Leonidas Castrounis). Garcia’s Floyd, who claims to have a secret past, ambles through a two-hour-plus movie that nearly forgets to give this crew any story to speak of.The writer-director, Brian Petsos, misses the timing or verve shown in his short films, which have been a lovely outlet for freak-outs by Oscar Isaac. The star goofs off in a brief turn as a nefarious tycoon, hidden behind half-opaque glasses, a fey warble and a riot of facial hair. This and other touches keep suggesting half-remembered bits and bobs from indie crime capers and sketch shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s.While it’s not clear whether anyone could, Cohen doesn’t carry this movie, but he does wear an amusingly aerodynamic ponytail during the glimpses of Samuel’s future book tour. The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: “Big Gold Brick” looks all right but it truly just sits there.Big Gold BrickNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
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‘The Addams Family 2’ Review: Wednesday Goes West
by Aurelia Butler 30 September 2021, 11:00
America’s creepiest family takes a road trip in this animated sequel, though their antics are far more kooky than spooky.In 2019, the Addams family returned to the big screen for the first time since the 1990s, this time in animated form. The macabre clan, directly styled after Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoon characters and voiced by a star-studded cast, railed against normalcy and blew up a lot of stuff. Now, in a new sequel, they’re taking that show on the road. Like it’s predecessor, “The Addams Family 2” is more kooky than spooky, offering much more to young children than it may to the adults accompanying them.This newest iteration opens at a science fair; Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) has figured out how to implant her pet octopus’s intelligence into her dopey Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll). Though she captures the attention of the wealthy genius Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader), she merely earns a participation award, and her resulting melancholy makes her withdraw further from her parents.In an attempt to bond with their teenagers, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) take the family on a road trip to Death Valley, but their cross-country antics are waylaid when a pushy stranger (Wallace Shawn) insists Wednesday may have been switched at birth.The filmmakers (the “Addams Family” and “Sausage Party” directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon) are smart to focus on Wednesday for most of this plot. She is the wittiest character, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to voice her than Moretz. But where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.The Addams Family 2Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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