AMERICAN THEATRE | The Play That Got Away: A History of ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’

This is one in all three items about new revivals of Lorraine Hansberry’s seldom-produced second play. You can try the opposite two right here.

The girl who wrote A Raisin within the Sun believed her performs may change hearts and minds. But after widespread misreading of that 1959 masterpiece, although, Lorraine Hansberry was much less certain about that.

“I hardly think you’d find many theatregoers willing to pay a $9.90 top to come to the theatre to be indicted,” playwright Bill Branch wrote her, “as I rather think you bore in mind yourself when writing Raisin.”

Echoing that backhanded praise, in 1961 LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) wrote to her: “The position you have made for yourself (or which the society has marked for you) is significant. Your writing comes out of and speaks for the American middle class…The critics were joyous about Raisin for exactly that reason.”

How was Hansberry imagined to reply to this dismissiveness? To Branch she wrote, “I was a little stunned…to discover that you feel, implicitly, that I somehow contrived to write in Raisin a work which dutifully sidestepped Negro freedom because of one eye on the box office.”

This sort of response solely deepend Hansberry’s inherent ambivalence about theatre. She felt drawn to activism, whereas her convoluted private life alternately thrilled and depressed her. Still, she remained prolific, virtually regardless of herself. As the playwright Jane Wagner (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life within the Universe), who dated Hansberry in 1962, put it, “I loved that part of her wanted to save the world and didn’t think her plays were going to do it. She was trying to find the truth, just how good of a writer she was. She was very subjective after the success. She went inside herself.”

Hansberry completed a TV film about slavery and began work on a type of opera about Toussaint Louverture, diversifications of two novels, and two authentic novels. She almost completed simply two extra performs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which was staged in her lifetime, and Les Blancs, which has been mounted in varied variations since her loss of life. Both are fascinating, particularly on repeated viewings and in historic context. This month U.S. audiences will get two main revivals of Sign: In a Seattle manufacturing by the Williams Project and the Intiman Theatre, and in a staging at Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.

It’s a reevaluation that’s lengthy overdue for a play that didn’t actually get a good shake the primary time round.

“Sign carried the weight of her first success,” mentioned UC Berkeley theatre professor and Hansberry biographer Margaret Wilkerson. “While A Raisin in the Sun was very successful—it was, after all, a play about Black people by a Black woman—it was audacious of her to write a play about ‘white people.’ Writing a successful play about white people would make her ‘universal,’ and that was reserved for white people.”

“All of her plays depict the effort to stand with someone else,” mentioned literary critic Michael Anderson, who has written extensively about Hansberry. “Such a conclusion is uplifting in A Raisin in the Sun, sobering in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Its collection of broken souls illustrates the various ways we reject one another, and reckons the costs of such denial— costs so overwhelming that reconciliation can only be tentative.”

Rather than resolve ambivalence, the character Sidney Brustein invitations it. Passionate, smug, hilarious, scattered, hostile, affectionate, and inconsistent, Brustein might be loving or vicious, open or a smug know-it-all. He is intermittently efficient. He picks fights and will get distracted.

“I joke that he is the Jewish Hamlet,” says Anne Kauffman, who’s directing the BAM manufacturing. “He has that depth of despair, but he’s also one of the funniest guys around.”

Most importantly, Brustein by no means stops to assume or to pay attention. “If you stop moving, you have to look in the mirror, and if you look in the mirror, who’s to say what you’re going to see?” mentioned Chris Stack, who performed Sidney in Kauffman’s 2016 Chicago revival. “Even though Sidney is incredibly magnetic and charming,” mentioned Stack, “he’s really destructive.” 

You could know a person whose cussed lack of ability to alter led to a number of disasters, regardless of being a advantageous particular person in so many different methods. Many had been males of World War II classic who felt incredulous when, within the late Nineteen Sixties, individuals grew unrecognizable to them. For anybody acquainted with a sure music within the voices of uncles or grandfathers, Sidney is like assembly that man as a youthful man.

Hansberry started the play in 1960, when political corruption ran rampant in her rapid surroundings, as did the impulse for reform, even revolution.

“I lived around Little Italy,” recalled longtime Voice movie critic J. Hoberman. “My Assemblyman was Louis de Salvio. I got a call asking me who I was going to vote for. Louis de Salvio? I said, ‘He’s a hack.’ When I went to vote, my page in the voter book was gone.” 

In 1960, group members opened the primary drug therapy program on the Judson Church, and in 1961, neophyte Village Voice editors helped defeat political boss Carmine de Sapio. This hopeful spirit dominated the early drafts of the play and its initially fairly comedian ensemble. It includes Sidney Brustein, the previous owner-manager of a people spot referred to as Walden Pond, who has, unbeknownst to his spouse, Iris, additionally taken on a small group newspaper, The Village Crier. Sidney and Iris’s upstairs neighbor is (a caricature of) an absurdist playwright who achieves mainstream success. Their progressive pal, Wally O’Hara, is working to unseat the machine metropolis councilman. Sidney’s pal Alton, a Black ex-Communist now working in a bookstore, persuades Sidney to endorse Wally. Alton is in love with Iris’s sister Gloria, not figuring out that she is a name lady.

As Hansberry continued work on the play, inside divisions break up the Village reform motion, and Kennedy was assassinated. Later drafts are accordingly darker: Wally seems to be a covert machine operative, Iris is seduced by one other man and the profession he gives her, Alton learns of Gloria’s job and rejects her, she in flip commits suicide. Sidney should soak up all these blows, plus the blow to his self-regard from realizing that he’s not omniscient.

Hansberry additionally drew upon private episodes, as detailed within the handwritten draft of a preface discovered on the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Literary critic Anderson added that she engaged deeply with Ibsen, particularly The Wild Duck, whereas writing Brustein. “Hansberry’s deep-rooted existential terror made her an artist as well as an activist,” mentioned Anderson. “She understood that loneliness, isolation, and the need for intimacy is not limited by what side you’re on.”

‘‘The play was the edge of the end of something big and the beginning of something big,” the play’s first director, Carmen Capalbo, informed Anderson in 1999. “With the Kennedy assassination and the continuing Civil Rights movement, there was a sense of public trauma. But ‘the Sixties’ as we know them hadn’t happened yet. In its time, the play had something to do with the death of idealism.”

Sidney “addresses the attitudes of white liberals and ‘intellectuals’ disengaging from politics,” mentioned Wilkerson, “while illuminating the power of the individual to make meaningful change in the context of a dynamic world.”

Anderson feels {that a} dedication to activism, and to utilizing artwork for social justice, pissed off the artist in Hansberry. “Hansberry felt guilty writing because she was not being an activist, which is the ostensible theme of Sidney,” he added. “A key to Hansberry is ambivalence, in so many ways.” Anderson discerns a “shadow side”—psychic currents inside the author’s thoughts that “she was unwilling to accept,” which nonetheless present up in her performs. Her husband and producer, Robert Nemiroff, “called her ‘a being uncommonly possessed of fear,’” says Anderson. “If there’s a figure in the carpet, that’s it.”

Nemiroff, ever Hansberry’s champion, was a key motive the play bought produced in any respect.

“It was very important to Nemiroff to do The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” mentioned Wilkerson. “He wanted to show that A Raisin in the Sun was not an ‘accident,’ and to demonstrate that Lorraine was a great playwright who could write convincingly about the human condition—meaning that she was not only confined to writing about Black people.”

Hal Prince even briefly joined as co-producer/director, however thought Brustein had too many subplots making an attempt to say an excessive amount of. A colleague wrote to him that Hansberry “has thought of everything except incest.” Revisions Prince requested didn’t occur, and he regretfully withdrew.

When Capalbo joined as director, the play nonetheless wanted work, whilst rehearsals started. “When she gets into a scene between two people instead of ideas, it still holds up,” Capabo informed Anderson, “but it tended to be more verbose than it had to be.” Hansberry responded enthusiastically to Capalbo’s “pointed questions,” telling him, “Thank God somebody really read the play.” But as her most cancers worsened, she wasn’t in a position to make the adjustments he requested.

And there have been casting issues. Most actors ‘‘didn’t deliver a sure sort of music’’ to the function of Sidney, mentioned Capalbo. Early casting want  lists proposed John Cassavettes, Walter Matthau, and Dick Shawn for the title function. Capalbo favored comic Mort Sahl, who turned out to be a catastrophe. A non-actor extra accustomed to improvising, Sahl couldn’t be taught his traces, ran off to California, and digressed into tangents throughout rehearsals. After Nemiroff fired Sahl, Sahl requested Paul Newman to signify him in Actors’ Equity hearings over damages. (Newman refused, telling Sahl he lacked self-discipline and that “all you think about is broads.”) Sahl later claimed that as his nervousness mounted, co-producer Burt d’Lugoff, a doctor, had prescribed prescription drugs to assist him focus and sleep.

Gabriel Dell, a former Dead End Kid, changed Sahl eight days earlier than opening night time. His son Gabe has a photograph of the actor taken in the course of the manufacturing; he stands at a craftsman desk engaged on a collage. The collage features a joint of marijuana, with the phrases, “In case of panic, pull tape and smoke.” On opening night time, Dell apologized to the viewers for remaining on e book. His co-star, Rita Moreno, would non-verbally direct him to varied onstage bookcases the place his speeches had been surreptitiously posted.

The doomed manufacturing was saved alive for 101 performances by the efforts of Nemiroff and well-known buddies like Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks. Nemiroff would maintain the viewers for curtain speeches. “My wife is sick, keep this play alive!” Capalbo remembered him saying at one level. Douglas Turner Ward, a pal of Hansberry’s, felt embarrassed by the mawkish show. Capablo was additionally appalled; he informed Nemiroff, “You’re exploiting her illness; you’ve turned it into a circus.” 

Reviews of the unique manufacturing ranged from combined to unfavourable, and it closed on Jan. 10; Hansberry died two days later. Her will named Nemiroff literary executor and trustee however not beneficiary; as an alternative he was charged with conserving her legacy alive and distributing her inheritance to her household, her girlfriend Dorothy Secules, and motion organizations. Nemiroff took producing and selling critically; he purchased her literary rights and properties from her property for $40,000, which might be about $300,000 now. A pointy dealer and savvy operator, he stands out as probably the most devoted executors in literary historical past. Between 1965 and 1968, he tailored her letters, performs, and diaries into a group titled To Be Young, Gifted, and Black and produced a second Broadway staging of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window in 1972, although to comparable indifference. 

Sign has been solely sporadically revisited since. The first main revival of latest years was on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2014.

“Hansberry was our Shakespeare of that time,” mentioned OSF dramaturg Lue Douthit. “It takes a lot to be moved all the time or committed all the time. But it requires not just the loner. It actually requires society for that to happen, and to stay committed. Hansberry was able to deliver to me a vehicle by which I get to do that exploration.”

It’s a play whose engine will run in your thoughts lengthy after you get house from driving together with Sidney. After that, the automotive is yours to drive.

Elise Harris (she/her) has written for The New York Times, The Nation, and the literary journal Harp & Altar. An earlier article on Lorraine Hansberry might be discovered right here.

Related