Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are heading to Broadway later this month in Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, producers announced today.

The production, which opened a sold-out run Off Broadway at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February, is now set to be the final production of the 2022-23 Broadway season. Opening night for the limited, 80-performance run is Thursday, April 27, at the James Earl Jones Theatre.

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the revival will mark the first time the Hansberry play has been produced on Broadway in more than 50 years, and the first BAM-produced production to transfer to Broadway since The Gospel at Colonus 35 years ago.

Producing on Broadway will be Seaview, Sue Wagner, John Johnson, with Jeremy O. Harris and BAM.

The follow-up to Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window debuted on Broadway in 1964 shortly before the playwright’s death on January 12, 1965, at age 34. The recent Off Broadway staging broke all house records at BAM’s Harvey Theater.

The revival’s Broadway opening night comes just two week’s after the fifth and final season premiere on April 14 of Brosnahan’s Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Set in New York’s Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, Brustein’s Window focuses on the troubled marriage of idealistic writer Sidney (Isaac, in his Broadway debut) and aspiring actor Iris (Brosnahan). As the couple’s marriage seems to crumble, their friends and neighbors in the politically progressive West Village weave in and out of the Brusteins’ apartment and lives.

“This production, directed by Anne Kauffman and originally produced and nurtured by David Binder at BAM, is a celebration of the radical artistic vision of Lorraine Hansberry at the zenith of her art making,” said Joi Gresham, Literary Trustee, Estate of Lorraine Hansberry, in a statement.
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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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