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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With ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ approaching its final season, the star says that her black leather 2022 look is “a lot more modern than things I’ve been wearing.” The Hollywood Reporter shares behind-the-scenes photos of the actress getting ready for the awards show.

Rachel Brosnahan is ready, sort of, to move along from being thought of as Miriam Maisel, and attendees can see that in the look she wore to the 2022 CFDA Fashion Awards, which took place Monday at Cipriani South Street.

“It’s a little bit of an edgier look and a bit more youthful, and definitely a lot of fun,” The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star told The Hollywood Reporter of her CFDA red carpet look, a Sergio Hudson black leather minidress paired with black Wolford tights and Sarah Flint’s Perfect Dress Bootie in a luxe jacquard ($795) that the shoe designer has dubbed “Red Vienna.” Her jewelry included pieces by Anita Ko, KatKim and Eéra.

“My personal style is constantly evolving, and I enjoy pushing my own boundaries and getting out of my comfort zone when it comes to fashion,” the actress said ahead of the awards, noting that her stylist, Alexandra Mandelkorn, is an enthusiastic partner in that idea. “Ali and I have a lot of fun in our fittings, and right now fashion feels like an opportunity to express different sides of myself. Tonight’s look is a lot more modern than things I’ve been wearing, because this is a new chapter for me.”

Filming of the fifth and final season of Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel wrapped in the first few days of November, and Brosnahan admits that the end of the popular series hasn’t resonated for her just yet. “We’ve been shooting this season for nearly 10 months, and this is about the time we’d be wrapping up any season,” she said. “[Co-star Alex Borstein] and I were saying it’s not going to hit us until we’re supposed to come back, which would be January. For now, it was nice to sleep in on a Monday morning.”
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As she wraps up her six-year stint as the most adorable rebel the small screen has ever seen, Rachel Brosnahan is determined to cut just as iconoclastic a figure in real life Hollywood.

Less than 15 minutes into a coffee date at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, Rachel Brosnahan is spotted. “Is your name Rachel?” asks the waitress bringing her an apple strudel.

“Yes,” Brosnahan says. She says it softly, a little uneasily, so different from Midge, the brash character she has played to much acclaim on Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel for four seasons. Outside of her constricting costumes, Brosnahan looks different, too—more demure. Today her light brown hair is swept back, and she’s wearing jeans and an oversize beige blazer. “Oh my god, I love your show,” says the waitress, who introduces herself as Jess.

She used to say no when people asked her if she was Rachel Brosnahan or if they knew her from somewhere, until a friend told her she was trying too hard to be unassuming and that it came off as rude. Now she says yes and thank you. New York is a city where Brosnahan feels she can lie low, and the masks of the pandemic helped her have an extra layer of anonymity. Since public life has returned, she feels flattered to be recognized, but it’s awkward. “I became an actor because I didn’t want to be myself all the time,” she says. “Being yourself takes a lot of hard work.”

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has been a phenomenon since it debuted in 2017. It’s hilarious and nostalgic, the costumes are eye candy, and the ensemble cast has the kind of zany chemistry that is hard to create. But the core of the show, and the reason for Maisel mania, is Midge, who is complicated, opinionated, and ambitious in a time when women still had to get their husbands’ signatures for credit cards or leases. And Brosnahan has given the character the special sauce that allows her to be all of those things—multidimensional, demanding, difficult—and also supremely sympathetic and entertaining.

Brosnahan has had six years of being Midge. “She’s so unapologetic and confident,” she says of the character that made her recognizable. But the show that won Brosnahan both Emmy and Golden Globe awards is coming to a close—she’s currently filming the final season—and now its star is grappling with what’s next.

She could easily score talky roles like Midge, playing iterations of smart girls in comedies for the rest of her days. She would be great at it. But instead Brosnahan, 32, has decided to step out of the gilded cage of prestige comedy to do something unexpected: a western, set in 1897, called Dead for a Dollar. The film co-stars Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe and is directed by Walter Hill, who is known for being a master of the western and action genres (Deadwood, 48 Hours, The Warriors). Its premiere at the Venice Film Festival garnered a healthy dose of buzz.
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