NEW YORK — How can it be that the sexiest show on Broadway — heck, maybe the only sexy show on Broadway right now — was written in 1964? The street currently has a palpable terror when it comes to anything to do with sensuality, an absurd fear for which it pays a price with audiences. But the answer has two words: Lorraine Hansberry. Advertisement Hansberry was one of the 20th century’s great
American poetic geniuses who would have a list of works fully comparable to Eugene O’Neill, August Wilson, whomever the heck you want, had she not died at 34 on the closing night of “Sidney Brustein’s Window.” The play is now back on Broadway in a knockout, not-to-be-missed revival directed by Anne Kauffman and starring Rachel Brosnahan (“Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and sparring partner Oscar Isaac. Back in 1964, critics were totally mystified by this incredible play. They thought Hansberry just wrote stuff like “A Raisin in the Sun,” a vital but traditional piece of domestic realism about a Black
Chicago family with a story of overcoming
racism, told in a way that didn’t much threaten smug
New York liberals. Those critics wanted Hansberry to stay in her lane. The one they understood. And they said so. (Some of their progeny still do). Advertisement But Hansberry actually had jumped right into all the roiling traffic of her era and faked out those snippy guardians at the broadsheets: “Sign” is a play set in Greenwich Village in the simmering early 1960s. It’s mostly the portrait of a struggling young marriage between two very different spouses, the newspaper publisher Sidney and the aspiring
Actress Iris — not to mention an exploration of the limits of radicalism, the merits of the sensual life versus the political one, the betrayal of
Women, the oppression of homosexuals, the profoundly annoying aspects of left-wing radicals, the value of shutting the heck up about your views, the abiding nature of political corruption, the dysfunction of the American theater, the role of the media in corrupting and improving American life, and on and on and on. Julian De Niro and Miriam Silverman in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window" on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York. (Julieta Cervantes / HANDOUT) “Sign” is an extraordinary piece of writing: wise, vulnerable, rooted, funny and, above all, gorgeously poetic in its lyrical aspirations. Sure, Act 2 might have been even tighter if Hansberry had not been dying during previews. But so what? The script already was a masterpiece. I fell hard for this show when I first saw Kauffman’s production in 2016 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and it’s even better on Broadway where it now pulses with present-tense, in-the-moment acting. I’d swear no two performances of this show are even close to the same; this cast is far too alive for that. Nobody is sitting in a chair or behind a desk here, nor keeping everyone at a stylish, monologic remove. Brosnahan, an actress of formidable capability, is wrestling near to the death with every other
Actor in this ring, baring her soul. Her lack of a Tony Award nomination is simply absurd, given that this is far and away the performance in a play all season. In an era when many new plays simply split the authorial viewpoint into different characters and expect people to pony up and consume, here is a play from an era when America actually understood complexity of thought, when writers better realized that many things can be true at the same time and that audiences find their way into different characters in various ways. Gus Birney and Oscar Isaac in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window" on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York. (Julieta Cervantes / HANDOUT) Hansberry’s radical bonafides were unimpeachable — Paul Robeson, Nina Simone and Malcolm X all mourned at her funeral — and yet she not only poked fun at smug Marxists, she wrote a clearly racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic character with enough empathy and understanding of how people attain these views that the fearless Miriam Silverman got a much-deserved Tony nomination for her work as Iris’ bourgeois sister. Few would dare even conceive of, let alone write, that character now. Hansberry did it in 1964. Why did we go backward? But the she understood what a play is supposed to do, and so do Kauffman and her crew, including the intellectually sprawling Isaac, the relentless Glenn Fitzgerald (who refuses to sentimentalize his character), the intense Gus Birney, who shocks half the orchestra section, and even (to a point) Julian De Niro, who plays a young radical just trying to stay in the game of life with all these formidable intellects and weeping Manhattan souls. What a night of theater. It is moving indeed to see Hansberry’s work honored with this level of vitality and courage. Advertisement At the James Earl Jones Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York; thesignonbroadway.com Chris Jones is a Tribune critic. cjones5@chicagotribune.com Julian De Niro and Andy Grotelueschen in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window" on Broadway at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York. (Julieta Cervantes / HANDOUT)