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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