Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan lit up the stage on Thursday night during the opening of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Set in the 1960s bohemia of Greenwich Village, the play follows a couple struggling to find their authentic selves during a period of radical social change. Isaac said he was drawn to the story’s examination of identities and how they can fluctuate throughout the course of a marriage or a career.

“The real secret is there is no authentic self,” Isaac told Variety before the show. “It’s really hard to get to that place because you have to basically die. The ego death has to happen. And then you have to just allow yourself to feel.”

He continued, “All the selves that [Sidney] had defined, including his own, are disintegrating right in front of him. There’s nothing to hold onto, including his sign and the things that he feels like he’s supposed to be doing.”

The audience at opening night included Bradley Cooper, Mike Birbiglia and Keith Sutherland. One of the most enthusiastic audience members was Isaac’s “Moon Knight” co-star Ethan Hawke, who was seen laughing and cheering throughout the show.

“I’ll tell you one thing: Oscar is one of the best actors out there,” Hawke told Variety during intermission. “It’s not easy getting up on that stage.”

The production marks the first major New York revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s (“A Raisin in the Sun”) second and final play, which ran on Broadway in the fall of 1964. Nearly six decades later, many of the questions and conversations contained in Hansberry’s work remain utterly relevant.
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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.
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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.”
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