Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan will star in the first major New York revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window this February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM announced today.
The production, running Feb. 4-23, 2023, at the BAM Harvey Theater, will be directed by Obie Award winner Anne Kauffman.
Described by BAM as a “sweeping drama of identity, idealism, and love,” The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is set in 1960s Greenwich Village and focuses on a diverse group of friends “whose loudly proclaimed progressive dreams can’t quite match up with reality. At the center are Sidney and Iris Brustein, fighting to see if their marriage – with all its crackling wit, passion, and petty cruelty – will be the final sacrifice to Sidney’s ideals.”
The play debuted on Broadway in 1964, five years after Hansberry’s masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun and shortly before her death in 1965 at age 34. Brustein’s Window has not been produced on a major New York stage since then. Kauffman presented an acclaimed revival of the work in 2016 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.
“We are in dire need of Hansberry’s voice…we know so little of her and define her by one play: A Raisin in the Sun,” Kauffman said in a statement. “Without a doubt Raisin is a masterpiece, but Hansberry’s evolution and contribution to this country’s culture, history and political motion stretches way beyond that astonishing accomplishment. Her work as an artist and activist is varied and deep. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, written four years after A Raisin in the Sun, embraces human complexity and frailty while aggressively shaking us free of our delusions, yet very few people know of it. Now they’ll know.”
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