I have added new scans of Rachel Brosnahan to the gallery so, you can go there to take a look and enjoy!
2023 Magazine Scans > Vogue (February 2023)
For her first stage role in a while, the ‘Mrs. Maisel’ actor is ready to embrace the role of another imperfect but lovable woman performer in a rocky marriage.
For Rachel Brosnahan, all roads lead back to theatre. The celebrated actor and producer combines unparalleled range, depth, and power in her work without batting an eye. She has spent her professional career engaging questions of sexism, confidence, and empowerment as she plays misunderstood, unfulfilled, or forgotten women onstage and screen.
Brosnahan’s 2009 debut at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre hinted at her ascent; she had just finished her first year at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute through NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts when she performed there in Bridget Carpenter’s Up. She made a double splash in 2013, both with a breakout role on Netflix’s House of Cards as Rachel Posner, a high-end escort turned White House pawn, and with her Broadway debut in The Big Knife. Her next high-profile one-two punch came with the role of Desdemona opposite David Oyewelo and Daniel Craig in Othello at New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, followed the next year by her lead turn in the Amazon Prime Video series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, for which she has since won a Primetime Emmy and two Golden Globes.
Given that success, theatregoers might reasonably have wondered if they’d see her onstage again; stage actors who make successful transitions into film and television don’t always come back. Not to worry: She’s now starring in the first major New York revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which starts previews at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) this weekend. The play arrives at a time of continued political unrest and global uncertainty, making the play’s discussion of corruption, race, and gender even more vital.
Brosnahan stars opposite Oscar Isaac as Iris Brustein, a struggling actress in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, who grows tired of her husband’s barbs and must decide whether to end the marriage. Obie winner Anne Kauffman directs.
This project marks a homecoming within a homecoming for Brosnahan. She’s not only back onstage after House of Cards and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but she returns to the stage with a heightened sense of service and care for the art and the industry. “When the opportunity came around, I jumped at the chance to work with this team and be a part of bringing this underappreciated piece back into public consciousness,” she told me in a recent interview.
I spoke to her about how she turned frustrations into career assets, unspoken gender rules, honoring Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy, and where her life parallels The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Continue reading »
The first major New York revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 Broadway play, comes to BAM this month. What took so long?
Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” began performances on Broadway in the fall of 1964. It closed the following January, days before Hansberry’s death, having run 101 performances.
It was hardly a flop. The reviews were generally admiring, and the support of the theater community, who rallied to keep the show going, was unstinting. Of the new plays that opened that fall, only a few ran so long. But unlike “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry’s earlier Broadway show, which remains a staple of regional theaters and high school classrooms, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” has been occluded, all but forgotten.
“Isn’t that insane?” the director Anne Kauffman asked.
This was on a recent afternoon in a rehearsal room of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Kauffman and her stars, the actors Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, were preparing for the play’s first major New York revival since a 14-performance run in 1972. Combining the published script with earlier drafts, Kauffman’s production is scheduled to begin performances on Saturday. She directed a revival of “Sign” at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in 2016. But she didn’t feel finished with it.
“I loved that production. I really did,” she said. “But I had no idea what I was doing compared to the depths that we’re going to on this one.”
Continue reading »
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.
Continue reading »
Hello everyone!
I am working to get the old stuff added as soon as possible and I have added photos of Rachel Brosnahan from 2014. More photos are coming!
Photoshoots & Portraits > 2014 Photoshoots & Portraits
Photoshoots & Portraits > 2013 Photoshoots & Portraits
Public Appearances > 2014 Public Appearances
Magazine Scans > 2014 Magazine Scans
Photoshoots & Portraits > 2013 Photoshoots & Portraits
Public Appearances > 2014 Public Appearances
Magazine Scans > 2014 Magazine Scans
