In October of 1964, five years after A Raisin in the Sun made Lorraine Hansberry a leading figure in American letters, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened at New York’s Longacre Theatre. Fame had come fast for Hansberry, who was not yet 29 when she became, with Raisin, the first Black female playwright to have a show produced on Broadway. “The telephone has become a little strange thing with a life of its own,” she told a New Yorker interviewer after Raisin’s premiere in 1959, reacting to the rush of invitations and engagements that followed. If Hansberry’s first work had dramatized some of the racial prejudices she felt growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s, her second would tackle the political and social conflagrations of 1960s New York—where she’d moved as a 20-year-old college dropout the decade prior.
Centered on a gaggle of artists and writers in Greenwich Village, The Sign spoke directly to Hansberry’s Waverly Place milieu: a downtown cohort that included types who flirted with Communism; acolytes of “the abstractions flowing out of London or Paris”; and others who turned to “Zen, action painting, or even just Jack Kerouac,” as she described it in an essay published that fall. “The silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of some of my closest friends,” Hansberry wrote. It was the “climate and mood” of those types who “[constituted] the core” of The Sign.
In her 2018 biography, Looking for Lorraine, Imani Perry identified The Sign as Hansberry’s response to Another Country, her friend James Baldwin’s 1962 novel about “Village counterculture, queer sexuality, interracial intimacy.” Gathered around the play’s titular character—an entrepreneurial Jewish liberal who, besides being “a nervous, ulcerated, banjo-making young man,” per Hansberry, was also a restless romantic and the recent owner-publisher-editor of a small weekly paper—were Iris, his fiery, aspiring-actress wife; their friend Alton, a white-passing Black Marxist who falls in love with Iris’s call girl sister Gloria; David, the gay playwright in the apartment upstairs; and Wally, a local politician who gains—and later betrays—Sidney’s trust and support. The play offered a slice of very specific life, following the group as they searched for meaning in the melee of the 1960s. (As Robert Nemiroff, a producer of *The Sign—*and Hansberry’s former husband—would put it in 1965, “The very day the play opened, Khrushchev fell from power in Russia, the Conservative Party fell in England, and the Chinese set off their atom bomb; where such events can occupy 24 hours, what power can a single man feel over the shaping of his destiny?”) It would be the final play that Hansberry saw produced; by the time it premiered, the playwright was 34 and already dying from pancreatic cancer, tended to primarily by Nemiroff and her older lover, a woman named Dorothy Secules.
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