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The Sign In Sidney Brustein's Window
By the time of her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun she gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling wit his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice. These two plays remain milestones in the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continual ability to engage the imagination and heart. With an Introduction by Robert Nemiroff.
126 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
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778 people want to read
About the author
Lorraine Hansberry
49 books541 followersLorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 106 reviews
February 17, 2023
"The trouble with looking at ourselves honestly...is that we come up with the truth. And, baby, the truth is a bitch."
Lorraine Hansberry's second and final staged play has a bit of an "everything but the kitchen sink" quality about it that makes more sense when you consider she wrote and produced this while bravely battling the pancreatic cancer that would cruelly take her life at the tragically young age of 34. It's ambitious and sweeping and, yes, sometimes messy in both style and scope, like she knew she was running out of time and needed to express every troubling thought in her head while she still could.
A Raisin In The Sun #2: More Dreams Deferred, this is NOT. I'm sure that's what a lot of critics and audience members must have craved at the time, and it would have certainly been easier (not to mention more profitable) for Hansberry to continue telling variations of that same classic story over and over. But she chose to do something daring and different instead, and I applaud her for that.
Instead of an African-American family on the South Side of Chicago, Hansberry has shifted her focus to Sidney Brustein, an idealistic middle-aged Jewish man, his troubled marriage to a younger aspiring actress, and their ragtag community of family and friends in Greenwich Village, as everyone grapples with various crises of identity and integrity in the midst of rapid social upheaval during the mid-1960's.
Despite being an intimate domestic drama that never leaves its simple brownstone living room set, Hansberry's play tackles a sprawling array of controversial topics including political corruption, homosexuality, antisemitism, interracial marriage, prostitution, suicide, gender inequality, and racial injustice.
Strange as it may sound considering that long laundry list of heavy themes, this is also consistently, refreshingly FUNNY. I'm sure Hansberry's crackling wit and humorous dialogue must be even more delightful when performed on the stage.
At the very least, this offers a fascinating "time capsule" historical record of New York City's Bohemian subculture in the mid-1960's. Much of the dialogue here sounds like it's snatched verbatim from countless conversations, late-night debates, and drunken diatribes Hansberry herself no doubt witnessed and participated in throughout her career as a young, leftist writer and activist mingling with New York City's other artists, academics, and activists at the time.
But it's also a poignant, provocative examination of a man, marriage, neighborhood, and larger American society in a state of anxious and uncertain transition.
With fascism and white nationalism once again on the rise, racial tensions running high, police brutality and mass shootings making daily headlines, and climate change posing an existential threat to our planet and species, this feels as relevant and timely today as it must have felt then. The play's probing questions about how to protect and preserve our idealism and integrity in an increasingly cynical, corrupt, and disillusioned world resonated louder than ever for me.
Can't wait to join my friend Bonnie G. in seeing these characters and themes brought to life in the new production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, the first major NYC revival of this play since its original Broadway run.
Lorraine Hansberry's second and final staged play has a bit of an "everything but the kitchen sink" quality about it that makes more sense when you consider she wrote and produced this while bravely battling the pancreatic cancer that would cruelly take her life at the tragically young age of 34. It's ambitious and sweeping and, yes, sometimes messy in both style and scope, like she knew she was running out of time and needed to express every troubling thought in her head while she still could.
A Raisin In The Sun #2: More Dreams Deferred, this is NOT. I'm sure that's what a lot of critics and audience members must have craved at the time, and it would have certainly been easier (not to mention more profitable) for Hansberry to continue telling variations of that same classic story over and over. But she chose to do something daring and different instead, and I applaud her for that.
Instead of an African-American family on the South Side of Chicago, Hansberry has shifted her focus to Sidney Brustein, an idealistic middle-aged Jewish man, his troubled marriage to a younger aspiring actress, and their ragtag community of family and friends in Greenwich Village, as everyone grapples with various crises of identity and integrity in the midst of rapid social upheaval during the mid-1960's.
Despite being an intimate domestic drama that never leaves its simple brownstone living room set, Hansberry's play tackles a sprawling array of controversial topics including political corruption, homosexuality, antisemitism, interracial marriage, prostitution, suicide, gender inequality, and racial injustice.
Strange as it may sound considering that long laundry list of heavy themes, this is also consistently, refreshingly FUNNY. I'm sure Hansberry's crackling wit and humorous dialogue must be even more delightful when performed on the stage.
At the very least, this offers a fascinating "time capsule" historical record of New York City's Bohemian subculture in the mid-1960's. Much of the dialogue here sounds like it's snatched verbatim from countless conversations, late-night debates, and drunken diatribes Hansberry herself no doubt witnessed and participated in throughout her career as a young, leftist writer and activist mingling with New York City's other artists, academics, and activists at the time.
But it's also a poignant, provocative examination of a man, marriage, neighborhood, and larger American society in a state of anxious and uncertain transition.
With fascism and white nationalism once again on the rise, racial tensions running high, police brutality and mass shootings making daily headlines, and climate change posing an existential threat to our planet and species, this feels as relevant and timely today as it must have felt then. The play's probing questions about how to protect and preserve our idealism and integrity in an increasingly cynical, corrupt, and disillusioned world resonated louder than ever for me.
Can't wait to join my friend Bonnie G. in seeing these characters and themes brought to life in the new production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, the first major NYC revival of this play since its original Broadway run.
February 12, 2018
How the world turns. Lorraine Hansberry’s second play featuring a loose gang of liberal strivers and losers who struggle to make their voices heard politically, just might be, if viewed through a reducing lens, the grudging voices of enlightened conservatives in a disintegrating GOP. A creative conservative playwright—if such a person existed (how would we know, there is no proof)—could adapt this quietly devastating but ultimately fierce and brave and humane play to reflect conservative’s acknowledgement that their adherents are composed of just this diverse band of individuals working together for governance that works within law and without corruption or favor.
It is Black History Month and PBS recently aired an American Masters special retrospective on the life of Lorraine Hansberry, playwright forever famous for her universally-loved play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and suffered along with them the ignorance and backwardness of the stodgy thinking among white Americans, both liberals and conservatives, at the time.
Hansberry was only thirty-four years old when she died, shortly after her second play opened to mixed reviews on Broadway October 14, 1964 for one-hundred-and-one performances. Earlier that same year Hansberry had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she was struggling to write and revise the play through her disorientation and pain. Within a few short months of the October opening she would be dead, on January 12, 1965, and that day her play closed on Broadway for good.
When I picked this play up recently, I struggled with the 1960s-scent of it, despite its superficial relevance to now: a diverse and politically active group of people agitate to find, field, and elect the candidate of their choice in an important local election. Sounds like a play that could live forever, right? Hansberry’s instincts were so spot-on. My initial recoil from the datedness of the play began to change near the end of Act Two when things start to unravel for real, paying bare the true heart of things and the work’s universality. Act Three is icing on the cake. So it is that first act that was the problem all along, I guess.
The play has three acts and a cast of nine. Each of the characters seems to represent a larger group; there is a mixed race man, a prostitute, a gay man, a Jewish man…you get the picture. Each of their difficulties in society needs addressing, and is the reason they band together politically to elect someone they believe will look after them. Each of the characters has high ideals but don’t necessarily treat others within their diverse group with the dignity they demand for themselves. The person they elect to represent them politically uses their support to get elected and then sells them out to monied interests.
The play could be a total bummer, but it is strangely lit from within by the naïve voice of a failed actress who, despite her lack of education and her inability to act, can see beyond what people say to what they do. She can see, for instance, that her husband cares more about helping people he doesn’t personally know rather than caring about the woman he is married to. To her he is dismissive, condescending, paternal. The mixed-race character has attitudes every bit as narrow, prejudiced, and cruel as those that had persecuted him his entire life. There is a supporter of Goldwater in the mix: she is intelligent, compassionate, and brave but also an anti-Semite and racist. In other words, people are complicated, and Hansberry allows us some time to digest that before suggesting we get up because we have work to do:
I am not a believer in the conservative political or social platform. However, I am not wholly on board with liberal political groups either because they appear to be tone deaf and righteous and sometimes wrong. I believe the best solutions for government are often forged in the fire of differing opinions. We need a strong confident conservative voice in this country, not crazy far right closed-mindedness, to keep the left from blowing up their own side. Therefore I hope conservatives pull themselves together and remember what they believe.
The edition of this play I am reading has a Foreword written by a show-goer at the time the show played Broadway, John Braine, and an Introduction written by Hansberry’s former husband, the Jewish song writer Robert Nemiroff. I could not read these sections first—I had to go directly to the play, of course, or I wouldn’t know whereof they spoke. It is with some frustration I ask publishers to explain why these detailed examinations and discussions of the play are not placed at the end of the book in an Afterword or an Epilogue. That is where we want to read them. Those later sections are generally written by the play’s author, I realize, but convention sometimes needs to be shaken up. Anyway, I read them after the play and was glad for them.
Braine is convinced the play is a great one which was damned, not because of Act One which I have suggested, but because of the ending: the play acknowledges the inadequacies of each of the characters and does not condemn nor moralize. The affirmation and acceptance of man’s failures was the greatest sin, no matter that the idea was to do better tomorrow. Braine suggests a different age or a different country, perhaps, would find a public more at ease with what the brilliant and forward-thinking Hansberry had given us.
I felt similarly, my mind going directly to moderate conservatives who are being pushed around so they no longer know what they believe. Principled conservatives have gay people and black people and Jews in their ranks and somehow still manage to classify themselves as conservatives first. Hansberry’s friend James Baldwin tried to explain his ‘troubling ambivalence’ after seeing it—until he realized that what made him uncomfortable was Brustein’s ‘particular quality of commitment.’ In other words, Brustein continued to believe in commitment to our ideals, even when people let him down. For Baldwin, the play became an experience in soul-searching.
Ex-husband Nemiroff, for his part, thought the play brilliant, so full of ideas it couldn’t be easily classified or digested. Apparently the play’s only ‘rave’ review was from the Wall Street Journal correspondent: “…The taste left in the mouth after then final curtain is both bitter and good. For the playwright herself has taste, of the best kind.” But Hansberry never counted on plaudits. “…if there was one thing Lorraine Hansberry did not believe, it was that talent will ‘out’ in the end.” She herself thought the play was good, with lots of funny lines of which she was inordinately proud.
It is Black History Month and PBS recently aired an American Masters special retrospective on the life of Lorraine Hansberry, playwright forever famous for her universally-loved play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and suffered along with them the ignorance and backwardness of the stodgy thinking among white Americans, both liberals and conservatives, at the time.
Hansberry was only thirty-four years old when she died, shortly after her second play opened to mixed reviews on Broadway October 14, 1964 for one-hundred-and-one performances. Earlier that same year Hansberry had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she was struggling to write and revise the play through her disorientation and pain. Within a few short months of the October opening she would be dead, on January 12, 1965, and that day her play closed on Broadway for good.
When I picked this play up recently, I struggled with the 1960s-scent of it, despite its superficial relevance to now: a diverse and politically active group of people agitate to find, field, and elect the candidate of their choice in an important local election. Sounds like a play that could live forever, right? Hansberry’s instincts were so spot-on. My initial recoil from the datedness of the play began to change near the end of Act Two when things start to unravel for real, paying bare the true heart of things and the work’s universality. Act Three is icing on the cake. So it is that first act that was the problem all along, I guess.
The play has three acts and a cast of nine. Each of the characters seems to represent a larger group; there is a mixed race man, a prostitute, a gay man, a Jewish man…you get the picture. Each of their difficulties in society needs addressing, and is the reason they band together politically to elect someone they believe will look after them. Each of the characters has high ideals but don’t necessarily treat others within their diverse group with the dignity they demand for themselves. The person they elect to represent them politically uses their support to get elected and then sells them out to monied interests.
The play could be a total bummer, but it is strangely lit from within by the naïve voice of a failed actress who, despite her lack of education and her inability to act, can see beyond what people say to what they do. She can see, for instance, that her husband cares more about helping people he doesn’t personally know rather than caring about the woman he is married to. To her he is dismissive, condescending, paternal. The mixed-race character has attitudes every bit as narrow, prejudiced, and cruel as those that had persecuted him his entire life. There is a supporter of Goldwater in the mix: she is intelligent, compassionate, and brave but also an anti-Semite and racist. In other words, people are complicated, and Hansberry allows us some time to digest that before suggesting we get up because we have work to do:
“Yes…weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again…Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”We can’t just lie around bemoaning our foolishness and inadequacies but must make something of the hurt it causes us.
“…people wanna be better than they are…and I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things.”
I am not a believer in the conservative political or social platform. However, I am not wholly on board with liberal political groups either because they appear to be tone deaf and righteous and sometimes wrong. I believe the best solutions for government are often forged in the fire of differing opinions. We need a strong confident conservative voice in this country, not crazy far right closed-mindedness, to keep the left from blowing up their own side. Therefore I hope conservatives pull themselves together and remember what they believe.
The edition of this play I am reading has a Foreword written by a show-goer at the time the show played Broadway, John Braine, and an Introduction written by Hansberry’s former husband, the Jewish song writer Robert Nemiroff. I could not read these sections first—I had to go directly to the play, of course, or I wouldn’t know whereof they spoke. It is with some frustration I ask publishers to explain why these detailed examinations and discussions of the play are not placed at the end of the book in an Afterword or an Epilogue. That is where we want to read them. Those later sections are generally written by the play’s author, I realize, but convention sometimes needs to be shaken up. Anyway, I read them after the play and was glad for them.
Braine is convinced the play is a great one which was damned, not because of Act One which I have suggested, but because of the ending: the play acknowledges the inadequacies of each of the characters and does not condemn nor moralize. The affirmation and acceptance of man’s failures was the greatest sin, no matter that the idea was to do better tomorrow. Braine suggests a different age or a different country, perhaps, would find a public more at ease with what the brilliant and forward-thinking Hansberry had given us.
I felt similarly, my mind going directly to moderate conservatives who are being pushed around so they no longer know what they believe. Principled conservatives have gay people and black people and Jews in their ranks and somehow still manage to classify themselves as conservatives first. Hansberry’s friend James Baldwin tried to explain his ‘troubling ambivalence’ after seeing it—until he realized that what made him uncomfortable was Brustein’s ‘particular quality of commitment.’ In other words, Brustein continued to believe in commitment to our ideals, even when people let him down. For Baldwin, the play became an experience in soul-searching.
Ex-husband Nemiroff, for his part, thought the play brilliant, so full of ideas it couldn’t be easily classified or digested. Apparently the play’s only ‘rave’ review was from the Wall Street Journal correspondent: “…The taste left in the mouth after then final curtain is both bitter and good. For the playwright herself has taste, of the best kind.” But Hansberry never counted on plaudits. “…if there was one thing Lorraine Hansberry did not believe, it was that talent will ‘out’ in the end.” She herself thought the play was good, with lots of funny lines of which she was inordinately proud.
February 20, 2023
I'll be attending a local production of this soon and... let's just say I'm nervous.
Update: The recent Seattle performance (2/17/23) was most notable for the strength of the cast and their commitment to putting across this play's many (many, many) various messages. Even so, this is a play of ideas, with each character given moments of passionate expression. That is what motivates nearly all of the action, and it grows intermittently tiresome over the course of close to three hours.
The production itself was very good, with thoughtful blocking of very talented players. The set design did away with several of the features called for in the original script, however it functioned well and served the needs of the actors and director. Lighting was excellent; costumes were bizarre in that they were contemporary and yet references to the early 1960s remained in the dialogue.
I'm glad I read it prior to attending. I'm left with the impression that solid production values and a skilled company are insufficient to make this a great night of theater. It will be very interesting to see how the upcoming NYC production is received.
Update: The recent Seattle performance (2/17/23) was most notable for the strength of the cast and their commitment to putting across this play's many (many, many) various messages. Even so, this is a play of ideas, with each character given moments of passionate expression. That is what motivates nearly all of the action, and it grows intermittently tiresome over the course of close to three hours.
The production itself was very good, with thoughtful blocking of very talented players. The set design did away with several of the features called for in the original script, however it functioned well and served the needs of the actors and director. Lighting was excellent; costumes were bizarre in that they were contemporary and yet references to the early 1960s remained in the dialogue.
I'm glad I read it prior to attending. I'm left with the impression that solid production values and a skilled company are insufficient to make this a great night of theater. It will be very interesting to see how the upcoming NYC production is received.
April 4, 2023
{Warning - Spoiler-ish discussion ensues...}
2.5,rounded up.
Hansberry will always be remembered for her classic masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun, but her tragic death from cancer at age 34 precluded the long and distinguished career that play promised. This was the only other major play by her performed in her lifetime, closing in 1965 on the day of her death, after a harrowing 101 Broadway performances.
The play suffers from not being fine-tuned by the playwright due to her illness, and this published edition restores a largely superfluous scene wisely excised from the original production. The play is still somewhat of a mess, veering from the kitchen-sink realism of her earlier work to flights of non-naturalistic fantasy that ... just don't work.
It centers on the residents of a rundown Greenwich Village apartment complex; Sidney is a young Jewish intellectual liberal, who has failed at a number of ventures, most recently a supper club that has just closed at the beginning of the play. He becomes involved in the campaign of a local politician (the titular sign is a poster stating: 'Clean Up Community Politics'), urged on by his light-skinned 'Negro' friend Alton.
His bickering wife Iris is an aspiring actress, who is too scared to actually audition - she is of Greek/Irish/Cherokee heritage, so naturally was played by ... Rita Moreno (!!??) in that original production - and Rachel Brosnahan in the recent revival (wait, wouldn't she be better suited for SIDNEY?). Her matronly, quasi-racist sister Mavis was played initially by Alice Ghostley in a Tony Award-winning performance. Other characters include the gay playwright upstairs neighbor, and the third sister, Gloria, who has been touted as an international model, but is in actuality a prostitute. When Alton, who has proposed to this sister (Mavis is appalled, naturally!) learns the truth, he dumps Gloria, who promptly commits suicide!
There is a lot to admire in individual scenes and speeches, but as the critics cruelly noted at the time - it just doesn't come together in satisfactory fashion and has rarely been produced in subsequent years - although the recent off-Broadway revival got respectable notice and business, no doubt due to Ms. Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, who played Sidney. .This edition includes a 40-page essay by Hansberry's widower, explicating how the NY theatre community tried to rally forces to keep the play open, that is actually far more interesting than the play itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koNXV...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-fId...
2.5,rounded up.
Hansberry will always be remembered for her classic masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun, but her tragic death from cancer at age 34 precluded the long and distinguished career that play promised. This was the only other major play by her performed in her lifetime, closing in 1965 on the day of her death, after a harrowing 101 Broadway performances.
The play suffers from not being fine-tuned by the playwright due to her illness, and this published edition restores a largely superfluous scene wisely excised from the original production. The play is still somewhat of a mess, veering from the kitchen-sink realism of her earlier work to flights of non-naturalistic fantasy that ... just don't work.
It centers on the residents of a rundown Greenwich Village apartment complex; Sidney is a young Jewish intellectual liberal, who has failed at a number of ventures, most recently a supper club that has just closed at the beginning of the play. He becomes involved in the campaign of a local politician (the titular sign is a poster stating: 'Clean Up Community Politics'), urged on by his light-skinned 'Negro' friend Alton.
His bickering wife Iris is an aspiring actress, who is too scared to actually audition - she is of Greek/Irish/Cherokee heritage, so naturally was played by ... Rita Moreno (!!??) in that original production - and Rachel Brosnahan in the recent revival (wait, wouldn't she be better suited for SIDNEY?). Her matronly, quasi-racist sister Mavis was played initially by Alice Ghostley in a Tony Award-winning performance. Other characters include the gay playwright upstairs neighbor, and the third sister, Gloria, who has been touted as an international model, but is in actuality a prostitute. When Alton, who has proposed to this sister (Mavis is appalled, naturally!) learns the truth, he dumps Gloria, who promptly commits suicide!
There is a lot to admire in individual scenes and speeches, but as the critics cruelly noted at the time - it just doesn't come together in satisfactory fashion and has rarely been produced in subsequent years - although the recent off-Broadway revival got respectable notice and business, no doubt due to Ms. Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, who played Sidney. .This edition includes a 40-page essay by Hansberry's widower, explicating how the NY theatre community tried to rally forces to keep the play open, that is actually far more interesting than the play itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koNXV...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-fId...
January 22, 2012
This play is a quick read, as we flow through the drama Hansberry has created to articulate the intellectual struggle of the middle class 'revolutionaries'. The characters are 'bohemians' who think life away and are afraid of the imperfection of action. It ends on an inspiring note, hence differentiating itself from Chekhov. Although the similarities as far as comedy infused with middle class morality conflicts abound. More people should read this play- it'd be great if schools made this play a requirement as well as A Raisin in the Sun- which I read in high school. It had the longest run on Broadway for the year it was on, and garnered many rave reviews. Hansberry wrote it while she was battling cancer.
June 15, 2016
One of the most underrated American plays in existence. Wild, chaotic, stunning, and beautiful.
July 4, 2025
MAVIS: Of course I decided against it. A divorce? For what? Because a marriage was violated? Ha! We’ve got three boys and their father is devoted to them; I guess he’s devoted to all four of his boys. And what would I do? There was no rush years ago at home to marry Mavis Parodus; there was just Fred then. In this world there are two kinds of loneliness and it is given to each of us to pick. I picked. And, let’s face it, I cannot type.
SIDNEY (Quietly shaking his head): But you want only simple people and simple problems in literature…
MAVIS: Sure, isn’t life enough?
listened to the oscar isaac and rachel brosnahan audiobook while driving from florida to michigan. life is a problem!
8/19/23:
But the truth of the matter is, dear friends, I am afraid that I have experienced the death of the exclamation point. It has died in me. I no longer want to exhort anybody about anything. It’s the final end of boyhood: the death of the exclamation point in my life.
notes: chaotic, messy, magnificent. i don’t know if hansberry knew she was dying when she wrote this, but it feels like she was trying to tell us all she would’ve done.
December 11, 2018
Compared to the majesty of Raisin, which I've taught (and thus read) about five or six times, this one's a mess. Underdeveloped characters making too grand and too abstract pronouncements, wobbly themes and awkward dramatic shifts in mood, dialogue, and plot twists. Poor Hansberry was dying when she wrote it probably and expired very prematurely when it did its short run, so she probably wasn't at the peak of her considerable powers. If she hadn't been ambushed by cancer so scandalously young, who could imagine what she'd have created in her mature period?
February 1, 2023
Ultimately I just didn’t connect with this in the same way as with Raisin in the Sun. It was difficult for me to follow the theme and what she was trying to convey, and the story just wasn’t engaging. Maybe I’ll revisit again down the road.
January 1, 2022
Lorraine Hansberry’s second play, ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,’ is much less well known than her first, the absolutely fantastic ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ but it shows flashes of the same brilliance. It centers on Sidney Brustein, a married man in New York who’s had one business fail at the play’s opening and then plunges himself into another, a politically progressive newspaper. With his marriage going a little stale, and characters around him who are either cynical, in denial, or beaten down by life, he wrestles with making a difference in the world, and the idea of getting away from it all to lead a more authentic and pure existence. Interestingly, it’s compared at one point to the difference between the Thoreau of ‘Civil Disobedience’ and the Thoreau of ‘Walden.’
I love how Hansberry filled the work with cultural and literary references, and how balanced she was in presenting ideas from a diverse character set, including a gay playwright and black communist. The play strikes a balanced tone and an enlightened wisdom about the complexity of living in the modern world, most notably, how it’s possible to continue to be an optimist in spite of it all. The arc the main character goes through leads to a lovely, powerful ending, one that still resonates today amidst our own troubled times. Where the play fell a little short for me was in its other subplots, which didn’t seem that well integrated. It felt a little messy, maybe because life is messy, but for the purposes of a performance, it could have done with a tighter story. It’s still worth seeking out, and a poignant reminder of just how tragic it was that Hansberry died far too young at 34, with so much ahead of her.
Quotes:
On apathy:
“You see! There it is, man! We are confronted with the great disease of the modern bourgeois intellectual: ostrich-ism. I’ve been watching it happen to this one; the great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men.”
On capitalism:
Iris: “I just don’t have it. They say if you really have it – you stick with it no matter what – and that – that you’ll do anything-“
Sidney: “That is one of the great romantic and cruel ideas of our civilization. A lot of people ‘have it’ and they just get trampled to death by the mob trying to get up the same mountain.”
On confronting the problems of the world:
“In the ancient times, the good men among my ancestors, when they heard of evil, strapped a sword to their loins and strode into the desert; and when they found it, they cut it down – or were cut down and bloodied the earth with purifying death. But how does one confront these nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time?”
On divorce:
“Of course I decided against it. A divorce? For what? Because a marriage was violated? Ha! We’ve got three boys and their father is devoted to them; I guess he’s devoted to all four of his boys. And what would I do? There was no rush years ago at home to marry Mavis Parodus; there was just Fred then. In this world there are two kinds of loneliness and it is given to each of us to pick. I picked.”
On nature:
“Coming here makes me believe that the planet is mine again. In the primeval sense. Man and earth and earth and man and all that. You know. That we have just been born, the earth and me, and are just starting out. There is no pollution, no hurt; just me and this ball of minerals and gasses suddenly shot together out of the cosmos.”
On optimism in creating change; I love this one:
Wally: “You really are a fool.”
Sidney: “Always have been. (His eyes find his wife’s) A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and men change every day and that rivers run and that people wanna be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is – energy and energy can move things…”
I love how Hansberry filled the work with cultural and literary references, and how balanced she was in presenting ideas from a diverse character set, including a gay playwright and black communist. The play strikes a balanced tone and an enlightened wisdom about the complexity of living in the modern world, most notably, how it’s possible to continue to be an optimist in spite of it all. The arc the main character goes through leads to a lovely, powerful ending, one that still resonates today amidst our own troubled times. Where the play fell a little short for me was in its other subplots, which didn’t seem that well integrated. It felt a little messy, maybe because life is messy, but for the purposes of a performance, it could have done with a tighter story. It’s still worth seeking out, and a poignant reminder of just how tragic it was that Hansberry died far too young at 34, with so much ahead of her.
Quotes:
On apathy:
“You see! There it is, man! We are confronted with the great disease of the modern bourgeois intellectual: ostrich-ism. I’ve been watching it happen to this one; the great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men.”
On capitalism:
Iris: “I just don’t have it. They say if you really have it – you stick with it no matter what – and that – that you’ll do anything-“
Sidney: “That is one of the great romantic and cruel ideas of our civilization. A lot of people ‘have it’ and they just get trampled to death by the mob trying to get up the same mountain.”
On confronting the problems of the world:
“In the ancient times, the good men among my ancestors, when they heard of evil, strapped a sword to their loins and strode into the desert; and when they found it, they cut it down – or were cut down and bloodied the earth with purifying death. But how does one confront these nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time?”
On divorce:
“Of course I decided against it. A divorce? For what? Because a marriage was violated? Ha! We’ve got three boys and their father is devoted to them; I guess he’s devoted to all four of his boys. And what would I do? There was no rush years ago at home to marry Mavis Parodus; there was just Fred then. In this world there are two kinds of loneliness and it is given to each of us to pick. I picked.”
On nature:
“Coming here makes me believe that the planet is mine again. In the primeval sense. Man and earth and earth and man and all that. You know. That we have just been born, the earth and me, and are just starting out. There is no pollution, no hurt; just me and this ball of minerals and gasses suddenly shot together out of the cosmos.”
On optimism in creating change; I love this one:
Wally: “You really are a fool.”
Sidney: “Always have been. (His eyes find his wife’s) A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and men change every day and that rivers run and that people wanna be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is – energy and energy can move things…”
July 24, 2024
One of the best pieces of literature I’ve ever read. Subtle metatheatricality, the expertness of navigating the three-act play format, references to Shakespeare, the importance of playwriting and art and theater for social change, Camus and Greece and absurdism… etc. etc. etc… all my favorite themes wrapped up into one play. So incredibly relevant and such a necessary revival. There are so many more wonderful things I could have said but I kinda forgot. Anyway I loved this so so so much I can’t believe I put off reading it for so long. Wow
August 2, 2023
So fucking good. The staged adaptation was phenomenal, and I needed to read the play as soon as possible.
April 8, 2025
A delightful little romp through Bohemia. An unexpected surprise when immediately read following “A Raisin in the Sun”.
September 5, 2023
LORRAINE HANSBERRY – THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW – 1964-1986
This play was produced for the first time by Robert Nemiroff in 1964. Lorraine Hansberry wanted to modify some passages and even add here and there some modifications. She died soon after this production. It is not even clear she saw the premiere. The text available today is the play modified for a second production by Robert Nemiroff, Lorraine Hansberry’s literary executor. Lorraine Hansberry explains how in 1964 and a couple of years before, intellectuals in Greenwich Village in New York were living in a difficult period due to their desire to change the world, even to be revolutionary, and yet they were confronted with the harsh reality of the Cold War at the time. The play is a metaphor for these intellectuals in this situation of 1964. The war in Algeria was finished and it came to a close in 1962 with the independence of the country from French colonial rule and a compromise negotiated with Ben Bella brought out of prison for the occasion. The independence of Algeria was ratified by two referendums in France and Algeria. On the French side, the approval rate was 90.7%
Then in the same period, we have the events of Birmingham. “The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.” Along the same line we have the famous March On Washington DC and Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream.” But this period is also the period when Fidel Castro won the battle for the Cuban revolution in January 1959, and the subsequent Bay of Pigs Invasion that was “a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, covertly financed and directed by the U.S. government (April 17, 1961 – April 20, 1961).” This event caused another subsequent development. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba (October 16, 1962 – October 29, 1962).” (data from Wikipedia)
In the same period, we have to understand that reformistic left-leaning intellectuals in Greenwich Village had to cope with the necessary compromises that had to be found in every crisis. Lorraine Hansberry, in a New York Times interview on October 11, 1964, speaks of “the ‘betrayal’ of the Cuban Revolution by Castro” who instead of implementing the Agrarian Reform he had promised, nationalized the land of the plantations and thus the sugar production and industry. The promise of reform in elections in Greenwich Village is the same way betrayed after the victory, though in the direction of a compromise that practically stops the reform, whereas Fidel Castro went beyond what he had promised and implemented a communist revolution with his nationalizing the land of plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry came across a woman from Oklahoma who was being hassled in New York for a political poster she had set up in her window. The local establishment wanted her to take it down because that was not proper according to the general rules in New York The lady refused and Lorraine Hansberry explains: “Oklahoma stubbornness, in conflict with oily New York political conformity, triumphs.”
The main character does exactly that. He sells his bar or nightclub and buys the local newspaper in order to support the reformistic candidate, Wally O’Hara. The campaign is defined as such in a public street action. “O’Hara for Fair Housing / Jobs / Education,“ “Save the 20¢ Subway Fare,” “End Police Brutality,” and – below the Picasso Peace Dove – “Ban the Bomb.” And this goes along with “The Wally O’Hara Campaign Song.”
SING OUT THE OLD, SING IN THE NEW
IT’S YOUR BALLOT AND IT’S GOT A LOT OF WORK TO DO.
SWEEP OUT THE OLD, SWEEP IN THE NEW
WALLY O’HARA IS THE MAN FOR YOU!
WALLY O’HARA, WALLY O’HARA,
WALLY O’HARA IS THE MAN FOR YOU!
Strangely enough, what they thought was marginally able to win, actually wins big. But as soon as he has won, Wally O’Hara looks for compromises with the establishment. In her New York Times article, Lorraine Hansberry reveals the potential of the play originally, I mean the potential in the situation she alludes to.
1- A woman.
2- From the West, Oklahoma.
3- Characterized as white by her accent.
4- Apolitical.
5- She has a political poster in her window.
6- She is hassled to force her to remove it from her window, by the local establishment.
7- She refuses out of stubbornness and rejects New York political conformity.
8- She wins.
And this becomes in the play:
1- A man, Sidney Brustein.
2- Jewish.
3- White married to a Greek and Gaelic-Indian woman.
4- Sidney sells his business (nightclub or “simple” bar) and buys the local newspaper.
5- He supports a local reformist political candidate in an election.
6- The candidate wins but at once drops any idea of reform.
7- Like Castro winning on the promise of an Agrarian Reform but after the victory nationalizing the land of the plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry points out, in her NYT article, the dilemmas of intellectuals after World War II.
1- Intellectuals jumping in and out of the Communist Party in France: Picasso, Aragon, and many thousand more.
2- Search for a justification for their life, existentialism, Sartre, Camus, and all the others afterward.
3- Contorted into seeking a meaningful repudiation of all justifications of anything and, accordingly, turn[ing] to Zen, action painting, or even just Jack Kerouac. She is alluding to the theater of the Absurd with Samuel Beckett and Godot in his famous trilogy. Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, or Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. This absurd theater is, in fact, a simulacrum or a series of simulacra to hide the deeper meaning stated as absurd, like waiting for an underage little boy in Waiting for Godot.
So, in the end, Sidney Brustein and his wife Iris Parodus Brustein make do with Wally O’Hara’s victory and the subsequent betrayal to conform with the local establishment. And they just go back to living without any real commitment. He justifies his cowardice with Jung’s “murder of the Primal Father.“ This mythological crime is justified as follows by Sidney and others:
SIDNEY. (To DAVID.) We are all guilty!
DAVID. (Nodding.) Therefore, all guilt is equal!
GLORIA. (Beckoning to him.) Therefore, none are innocent.
DAVID. (Crossing to join them.) Therefore –
ALL. No one is guilty.
This syllogism leads to totalitarianism, to going back to their father’s ideas that are nothing but killing ideas. Sidney Brustein has the final word: “The Truth! If anyone argues with you, explain to the fool that it is harder to look through a needle than to look around one.” The first solution is to try to do what Wally O’Hara has promised. The second is to forget it and conform to the local establishment. We are after the speech “I Have a Dream,” by Martin Luther King. The dream is just an illusion.
This leads me to a very sad conclusion. In her days, Lorraine Hansberry was dreaming of a future that was maybe possible, like Martin Luther King. But today the revival of these plays is leading to the idea that the dream has not even started to be fulfilled. History has betrayed all African Americans and they will go on dying on the street shot dead by some police-man-or-woman, by some white supremacist, by some human simulacrum, a simulacrum that believes he has God on his side, the simulacrum of a non-existing being and situation, the simulacrum of a Black-African-Americans-devouring Black Hole coming this way to purify this planet of all that is black. A racist dream that is chromophobic in the name of white purity.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
VERSION FRANÇAISE
Cette pièce a été mise en scène pour la première fois par Robert Nemiroff en 1964. Lorraine Hansberry souhaitait modifier certains passages et même ajouter ici et là quelques modifications. Elle est décédée peu de temps après cette production. Il n'est même pas clair qu'elle ait vu la première. Le texte disponible aujourd’hui est la pièce modifiée pour une seconde production par Robert Nemiroff, l’exécuteur littéraire de Lorraine Hansberry. Lorraine Hansberry explique comment, en 1964 et quelques années auparavant, les intellectuels de Greenwich Village à New York vivaient une période difficile en raison de leur désir de changer le monde, voire d'être révolutionnaires, et pourtant ils étaient confrontés à la dure réalité de la guerre froide à l’époque. La pièce est une métaphore pour ces intellectuels dans cette situation de 1964. La guerre d'Algérie était terminée et elle s'est terminée en 1962 avec l'indépendance du pays de la domination coloniale française et un compromis négocié avec Ben Bella sorti de prison pour l'occasion. L'indépendance de l'Algérie a été ratifiée par deux référendums en France et en Algérie. Côté français, le taux d'approbation était de 90,7%
Puis, dans la même période, nous avons les événements de Birmingham. « La campagne de Birmingham, également connue sous le nom de mouvement de Birmingham ou de confrontation de Birmingham, était un mouvement américain organisé au début de 1963 par la Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) pour attirer l'attention sur les efforts d'intégration des Afro-Américains à Birmingham, en Alabama. » Dans le même esprit, nous avons la célèbre marche sur Washington DC et le discours de Martin Luther King, « I Have a Dream ». Mais cette période est aussi celle où Fidel Castro a remporté la bataille pour la révolution cubaine en janvier 1959, et l’invasion de la Baie des Cochons qui a suivi, « une opération militaire ratée de débarquement sur la côte sud-ouest de Cuba en 1961 par le Front révolutionnaire démocratique cubain ». composé d'exilés cubains qui étaient opposés à la révolution cubaine de Fidel Castro, et étaient secrètement financés et dirigés par le gouvernement américain (17 avril 1961 – 20 avril 1961). » Cet événement a provoqué un autre développement ultérieur. « La crise des missiles de Cuba, également connue sous le nom de crise d'octobre à Cuba, ou la panique des missiles, a été une confrontation de 13 jours entre les États-Unis et l'Union soviétique, au cours de laquelle les déploiements américains de missiles nucléaires en Italie et en Turquie ont été accompagnés de déploiements soviétiques. de missiles nucléaires à Cuba (16 octobre 1962 – 29 octobre 1962). » (données de Wikipédia)
Au cours de la même période, nous devons comprendre que les intellectuels réformistes de gauche de Greenwich Village ont dû faire face aux compromis nécessaires qu’il fallait trouver dans chaque crise. Lorraine Hansberry, dans une interview au New York Times du 11 octobre 1964, parle de « la ‘trahison’ de la Révolution cubaine par Castro » qui, au lieu de mettre en œuvre la réforme agraire qu'il avait promise, a nationalisé les terres des plantations et donc les plantations. la production et l’industrie de sucre. La promesse de réforme électorale à Greenwich Village a été trahie de la même manière après la victoire, mais dans le sens d'un compromis qui stoppe pratiquement la réforme, alors que Fidel Castro est allé au-delà de ce qu'il avait promis et a mis en œuvre une révolution communiste en nationalisant la terre des plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry a rencontré une femme de l'Oklahoma qui se faisait harceler à New York à cause d'une affiche politique qu'elle avait accrochée à sa fenêtre. L’establishment local voulait qu’elle la retire parce que ce n’était pas convenable selon les règles générales de New York. La dame a refusé et Lorraine Hansberry explique : « L’entêtement typique de l’Oklahoma, en conflit avec le conformisme politique bien rodé de New York, triomphe. »
C’est exactement ce que fait le personnage principal. Il vend son bar ou sa discothèque et achète le journal local afin de soutenir le candidat réformiste Wally O'Hara. La campagne est définie comme suit dans une action de rue. « O'Hara pour le logement équitable, des emplois et l’éducation », « Abandonnez le tarif du métro à 20 ¢ », « Mettez fin à la brutalité policière » et – sous la colombe de la paix de Picasso – « Interdisez la bombe ». Et cela va de pair avec « The Wally O’Hara Campaign Song ».
SORTEZ EN CHANTANT L'ANCIEN, FAITES ENTRER EN CHANTANT LE NOUVEAU
C'EST VOTRE BULLETIN DE VOTE ET IL Y A BEAUCOUP DE TRAVAIL À FAIRE.
BALAYER DEHORS L'ANCIEN, BALAYER DEDANS LE NOUVEAU
WALLY O'HARA EST L'HOMME QU’IL VOUS FAUT !
WALLY O'HARA, WALLY O'HARA,
WALLY O'HARA EST L'HOMME QU’IL VOUS FAUT !
Curieusement, ce qu’ils pensaient pouvoir gagner de manière marginale gagne en réalité gros. Mais dès sa victoire, Wally O’Hara cherche des compromis avec les forces en place. Dans son article du New York Times, Lorraine Hansberry révèle à l'origine le potentiel de la pièce, je veux dire le potentiel de la situation à laquelle elle fait allusion.
1- Une femme.
2- De l'ouest, de l'Oklahoma.
3- Caractérisée comme blanche par son accent.
4- Apolitique.
5- Elle a une affiche politique dans sa fenêtre.
6- Elle se fait harceler pour la forcer à l'enlever de sa fenêtre, par les notables locaux.
7- Elle refuse par entêtement et rejette le conformisme politique new-yorkais.
8- Elle gagne.
Et cela devient dans la pièce :
1- Un homme, Sidney Brustein.
2- Juif.
3- Blanc marié à une femme grecque et gaélique-indienne.
4- Sidney vend son commerce (discothèque ou simple bar) et achète le journal local.
5- Il soutient un candidat politique réformateur local lors d'une élection.
6- Le candidat gagne mais abandonne aussitôt toute idée de réforme.
7- Comme Castro gagnant sur la promesse d'une réforme agraire mais, après la victoire, il nationalise les terres des plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry souligne, dans son article du New York Times, les dilemmes des intellectuels après la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
1- Les intellectuels entrant et sortant du Parti communiste en France : Picasso, Aragon et plusieurs milliers d’autres.
2- Rechercher une justification à leur vie, l'existentialisme, Sartre, Camus, et tous les autres après eux.
3- Se contorsionnant pour rechercher un rejet significatif de toute justification de quoi que ce soit et, en conséquence, se tourner vers le Zen, l'action painting, ou même simplement Jack Kerouac. Elle fait allusion au théâtre de l'Absurde avec Samuel Beckett et Godot dans sa célèbre trilogie. En attendant Godot, Fin de Partie et Oh ! Les Beaux Jours, ou La Cantatrice Chauve d'Eugène Ionesco. Ce théâtre de l’absurde est en fait un simulacre ou une série de simulacres pour cacher le sens profond déclaré comme absurde, comme l'attente d'un petit garçon mineur dans En attendant Godot et la trilogie.
Ainsi, en fin de compte, Sidney Brustein et son épouse Iris Parodus Brustein se contentent de la victoire de Wally O’Hara et de la trahison qui a suivi pour se conformer à l’ordre établi local. Et ils retournent vivre sans réel engagement. Sidney Brustein justifie sa lâcheté par le « meurtre du Père Primordial » de Jung. Ce crime mythologique est justifié comme suit par Sidney et d’autres :
SIDNEY. (À DAVID.) Nous sommes tous coupables !
DAVID. (Hochant la tête.) Par conséquent, toutes les culpabilités sont égales !
GLORIA. (lui faisant signe.) Par conséquent, personne n’est innocent.
DAVID. (Traversant pour les rejoindre.) Donc –
TOUS. Personne n'est coupable.
Ce syllogisme conduit au totalitarisme, au retour aux idées de leurs pères qui ne sont que des idées tueuses. Sidney Brustein a le dernier mot : « La Vérité ! Si quelqu’un vous contredit, expliquez à cet imbécile qu’il est plus difficile de regarder à travers le chas d’une aiguille que de regarder autour de l’aiguille. La première solution est d’essayer de faire ce que Wally O’Hara a promis. La seconde est de l’oublier et de se conformer à l’ordre établi local. Nous sommes après le discours « I Have a Dream » de Martin Luther King. Le rêve n'est qu'une illusion.
Cela m’amène à une très triste conclusion. À son époque, Lorraine Hansberry rêvait d’un avenir peut-être possible, comme Martin Luther King. Mais aujourd’hui, la reprise de ces pièces laisse penser que le rêve n’a même pas encore commencé à se réaliser. L'histoire a trahi tous les Afro-Américains et ils continueront à mourir dans la rue, abattus par un policier ou une policière, par un suprémaciste blanc, par un simulacre humain, un simulacre qui croit avoir Dieu de son côté, le simulacre. d'un être et d'une situation inexistants, le simulacre d'un trou noir dévorant des Afro-Américains noirs et venant par ici pour purifier cette planète de tout ce qui est noir. Un rêve raciste et chromophobe au nom de la pureté blanche.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
This play was produced for the first time by Robert Nemiroff in 1964. Lorraine Hansberry wanted to modify some passages and even add here and there some modifications. She died soon after this production. It is not even clear she saw the premiere. The text available today is the play modified for a second production by Robert Nemiroff, Lorraine Hansberry’s literary executor. Lorraine Hansberry explains how in 1964 and a couple of years before, intellectuals in Greenwich Village in New York were living in a difficult period due to their desire to change the world, even to be revolutionary, and yet they were confronted with the harsh reality of the Cold War at the time. The play is a metaphor for these intellectuals in this situation of 1964. The war in Algeria was finished and it came to a close in 1962 with the independence of the country from French colonial rule and a compromise negotiated with Ben Bella brought out of prison for the occasion. The independence of Algeria was ratified by two referendums in France and Algeria. On the French side, the approval rate was 90.7%
Then in the same period, we have the events of Birmingham. “The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.” Along the same line we have the famous March On Washington DC and Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream.” But this period is also the period when Fidel Castro won the battle for the Cuban revolution in January 1959, and the subsequent Bay of Pigs Invasion that was “a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, covertly financed and directed by the U.S. government (April 17, 1961 – April 20, 1961).” This event caused another subsequent development. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba (October 16, 1962 – October 29, 1962).” (data from Wikipedia)
In the same period, we have to understand that reformistic left-leaning intellectuals in Greenwich Village had to cope with the necessary compromises that had to be found in every crisis. Lorraine Hansberry, in a New York Times interview on October 11, 1964, speaks of “the ‘betrayal’ of the Cuban Revolution by Castro” who instead of implementing the Agrarian Reform he had promised, nationalized the land of the plantations and thus the sugar production and industry. The promise of reform in elections in Greenwich Village is the same way betrayed after the victory, though in the direction of a compromise that practically stops the reform, whereas Fidel Castro went beyond what he had promised and implemented a communist revolution with his nationalizing the land of plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry came across a woman from Oklahoma who was being hassled in New York for a political poster she had set up in her window. The local establishment wanted her to take it down because that was not proper according to the general rules in New York The lady refused and Lorraine Hansberry explains: “Oklahoma stubbornness, in conflict with oily New York political conformity, triumphs.”
The main character does exactly that. He sells his bar or nightclub and buys the local newspaper in order to support the reformistic candidate, Wally O’Hara. The campaign is defined as such in a public street action. “O’Hara for Fair Housing / Jobs / Education,“ “Save the 20¢ Subway Fare,” “End Police Brutality,” and – below the Picasso Peace Dove – “Ban the Bomb.” And this goes along with “The Wally O’Hara Campaign Song.”
SING OUT THE OLD, SING IN THE NEW
IT’S YOUR BALLOT AND IT’S GOT A LOT OF WORK TO DO.
SWEEP OUT THE OLD, SWEEP IN THE NEW
WALLY O’HARA IS THE MAN FOR YOU!
WALLY O’HARA, WALLY O’HARA,
WALLY O’HARA IS THE MAN FOR YOU!
Strangely enough, what they thought was marginally able to win, actually wins big. But as soon as he has won, Wally O’Hara looks for compromises with the establishment. In her New York Times article, Lorraine Hansberry reveals the potential of the play originally, I mean the potential in the situation she alludes to.
1- A woman.
2- From the West, Oklahoma.
3- Characterized as white by her accent.
4- Apolitical.
5- She has a political poster in her window.
6- She is hassled to force her to remove it from her window, by the local establishment.
7- She refuses out of stubbornness and rejects New York political conformity.
8- She wins.
And this becomes in the play:
1- A man, Sidney Brustein.
2- Jewish.
3- White married to a Greek and Gaelic-Indian woman.
4- Sidney sells his business (nightclub or “simple” bar) and buys the local newspaper.
5- He supports a local reformist political candidate in an election.
6- The candidate wins but at once drops any idea of reform.
7- Like Castro winning on the promise of an Agrarian Reform but after the victory nationalizing the land of the plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry points out, in her NYT article, the dilemmas of intellectuals after World War II.
1- Intellectuals jumping in and out of the Communist Party in France: Picasso, Aragon, and many thousand more.
2- Search for a justification for their life, existentialism, Sartre, Camus, and all the others afterward.
3- Contorted into seeking a meaningful repudiation of all justifications of anything and, accordingly, turn[ing] to Zen, action painting, or even just Jack Kerouac. She is alluding to the theater of the Absurd with Samuel Beckett and Godot in his famous trilogy. Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, or Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. This absurd theater is, in fact, a simulacrum or a series of simulacra to hide the deeper meaning stated as absurd, like waiting for an underage little boy in Waiting for Godot.
So, in the end, Sidney Brustein and his wife Iris Parodus Brustein make do with Wally O’Hara’s victory and the subsequent betrayal to conform with the local establishment. And they just go back to living without any real commitment. He justifies his cowardice with Jung’s “murder of the Primal Father.“ This mythological crime is justified as follows by Sidney and others:
SIDNEY. (To DAVID.) We are all guilty!
DAVID. (Nodding.) Therefore, all guilt is equal!
GLORIA. (Beckoning to him.) Therefore, none are innocent.
DAVID. (Crossing to join them.) Therefore –
ALL. No one is guilty.
This syllogism leads to totalitarianism, to going back to their father’s ideas that are nothing but killing ideas. Sidney Brustein has the final word: “The Truth! If anyone argues with you, explain to the fool that it is harder to look through a needle than to look around one.” The first solution is to try to do what Wally O’Hara has promised. The second is to forget it and conform to the local establishment. We are after the speech “I Have a Dream,” by Martin Luther King. The dream is just an illusion.
This leads me to a very sad conclusion. In her days, Lorraine Hansberry was dreaming of a future that was maybe possible, like Martin Luther King. But today the revival of these plays is leading to the idea that the dream has not even started to be fulfilled. History has betrayed all African Americans and they will go on dying on the street shot dead by some police-man-or-woman, by some white supremacist, by some human simulacrum, a simulacrum that believes he has God on his side, the simulacrum of a non-existing being and situation, the simulacrum of a Black-African-Americans-devouring Black Hole coming this way to purify this planet of all that is black. A racist dream that is chromophobic in the name of white purity.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
VERSION FRANÇAISE
Cette pièce a été mise en scène pour la première fois par Robert Nemiroff en 1964. Lorraine Hansberry souhaitait modifier certains passages et même ajouter ici et là quelques modifications. Elle est décédée peu de temps après cette production. Il n'est même pas clair qu'elle ait vu la première. Le texte disponible aujourd’hui est la pièce modifiée pour une seconde production par Robert Nemiroff, l’exécuteur littéraire de Lorraine Hansberry. Lorraine Hansberry explique comment, en 1964 et quelques années auparavant, les intellectuels de Greenwich Village à New York vivaient une période difficile en raison de leur désir de changer le monde, voire d'être révolutionnaires, et pourtant ils étaient confrontés à la dure réalité de la guerre froide à l’époque. La pièce est une métaphore pour ces intellectuels dans cette situation de 1964. La guerre d'Algérie était terminée et elle s'est terminée en 1962 avec l'indépendance du pays de la domination coloniale française et un compromis négocié avec Ben Bella sorti de prison pour l'occasion. L'indépendance de l'Algérie a été ratifiée par deux référendums en France et en Algérie. Côté français, le taux d'approbation était de 90,7%
Puis, dans la même période, nous avons les événements de Birmingham. « La campagne de Birmingham, également connue sous le nom de mouvement de Birmingham ou de confrontation de Birmingham, était un mouvement américain organisé au début de 1963 par la Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) pour attirer l'attention sur les efforts d'intégration des Afro-Américains à Birmingham, en Alabama. » Dans le même esprit, nous avons la célèbre marche sur Washington DC et le discours de Martin Luther King, « I Have a Dream ». Mais cette période est aussi celle où Fidel Castro a remporté la bataille pour la révolution cubaine en janvier 1959, et l’invasion de la Baie des Cochons qui a suivi, « une opération militaire ratée de débarquement sur la côte sud-ouest de Cuba en 1961 par le Front révolutionnaire démocratique cubain ». composé d'exilés cubains qui étaient opposés à la révolution cubaine de Fidel Castro, et étaient secrètement financés et dirigés par le gouvernement américain (17 avril 1961 – 20 avril 1961). » Cet événement a provoqué un autre développement ultérieur. « La crise des missiles de Cuba, également connue sous le nom de crise d'octobre à Cuba, ou la panique des missiles, a été une confrontation de 13 jours entre les États-Unis et l'Union soviétique, au cours de laquelle les déploiements américains de missiles nucléaires en Italie et en Turquie ont été accompagnés de déploiements soviétiques. de missiles nucléaires à Cuba (16 octobre 1962 – 29 octobre 1962). » (données de Wikipédia)
Au cours de la même période, nous devons comprendre que les intellectuels réformistes de gauche de Greenwich Village ont dû faire face aux compromis nécessaires qu’il fallait trouver dans chaque crise. Lorraine Hansberry, dans une interview au New York Times du 11 octobre 1964, parle de « la ‘trahison’ de la Révolution cubaine par Castro » qui, au lieu de mettre en œuvre la réforme agraire qu'il avait promise, a nationalisé les terres des plantations et donc les plantations. la production et l’industrie de sucre. La promesse de réforme électorale à Greenwich Village a été trahie de la même manière après la victoire, mais dans le sens d'un compromis qui stoppe pratiquement la réforme, alors que Fidel Castro est allé au-delà de ce qu'il avait promis et a mis en œuvre une révolution communiste en nationalisant la terre des plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry a rencontré une femme de l'Oklahoma qui se faisait harceler à New York à cause d'une affiche politique qu'elle avait accrochée à sa fenêtre. L’establishment local voulait qu’elle la retire parce que ce n’était pas convenable selon les règles générales de New York. La dame a refusé et Lorraine Hansberry explique : « L’entêtement typique de l’Oklahoma, en conflit avec le conformisme politique bien rodé de New York, triomphe. »
C’est exactement ce que fait le personnage principal. Il vend son bar ou sa discothèque et achète le journal local afin de soutenir le candidat réformiste Wally O'Hara. La campagne est définie comme suit dans une action de rue. « O'Hara pour le logement équitable, des emplois et l’éducation », « Abandonnez le tarif du métro à 20 ¢ », « Mettez fin à la brutalité policière » et – sous la colombe de la paix de Picasso – « Interdisez la bombe ». Et cela va de pair avec « The Wally O’Hara Campaign Song ».
SORTEZ EN CHANTANT L'ANCIEN, FAITES ENTRER EN CHANTANT LE NOUVEAU
C'EST VOTRE BULLETIN DE VOTE ET IL Y A BEAUCOUP DE TRAVAIL À FAIRE.
BALAYER DEHORS L'ANCIEN, BALAYER DEDANS LE NOUVEAU
WALLY O'HARA EST L'HOMME QU’IL VOUS FAUT !
WALLY O'HARA, WALLY O'HARA,
WALLY O'HARA EST L'HOMME QU’IL VOUS FAUT !
Curieusement, ce qu’ils pensaient pouvoir gagner de manière marginale gagne en réalité gros. Mais dès sa victoire, Wally O’Hara cherche des compromis avec les forces en place. Dans son article du New York Times, Lorraine Hansberry révèle à l'origine le potentiel de la pièce, je veux dire le potentiel de la situation à laquelle elle fait allusion.
1- Une femme.
2- De l'ouest, de l'Oklahoma.
3- Caractérisée comme blanche par son accent.
4- Apolitique.
5- Elle a une affiche politique dans sa fenêtre.
6- Elle se fait harceler pour la forcer à l'enlever de sa fenêtre, par les notables locaux.
7- Elle refuse par entêtement et rejette le conformisme politique new-yorkais.
8- Elle gagne.
Et cela devient dans la pièce :
1- Un homme, Sidney Brustein.
2- Juif.
3- Blanc marié à une femme grecque et gaélique-indienne.
4- Sidney vend son commerce (discothèque ou simple bar) et achète le journal local.
5- Il soutient un candidat politique réformateur local lors d'une élection.
6- Le candidat gagne mais abandonne aussitôt toute idée de réforme.
7- Comme Castro gagnant sur la promesse d'une réforme agraire mais, après la victoire, il nationalise les terres des plantations.
Lorraine Hansberry souligne, dans son article du New York Times, les dilemmes des intellectuels après la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
1- Les intellectuels entrant et sortant du Parti communiste en France : Picasso, Aragon et plusieurs milliers d’autres.
2- Rechercher une justification à leur vie, l'existentialisme, Sartre, Camus, et tous les autres après eux.
3- Se contorsionnant pour rechercher un rejet significatif de toute justification de quoi que ce soit et, en conséquence, se tourner vers le Zen, l'action painting, ou même simplement Jack Kerouac. Elle fait allusion au théâtre de l'Absurde avec Samuel Beckett et Godot dans sa célèbre trilogie. En attendant Godot, Fin de Partie et Oh ! Les Beaux Jours, ou La Cantatrice Chauve d'Eugène Ionesco. Ce théâtre de l’absurde est en fait un simulacre ou une série de simulacres pour cacher le sens profond déclaré comme absurde, comme l'attente d'un petit garçon mineur dans En attendant Godot et la trilogie.
Ainsi, en fin de compte, Sidney Brustein et son épouse Iris Parodus Brustein se contentent de la victoire de Wally O’Hara et de la trahison qui a suivi pour se conformer à l’ordre établi local. Et ils retournent vivre sans réel engagement. Sidney Brustein justifie sa lâcheté par le « meurtre du Père Primordial » de Jung. Ce crime mythologique est justifié comme suit par Sidney et d’autres :
SIDNEY. (À DAVID.) Nous sommes tous coupables !
DAVID. (Hochant la tête.) Par conséquent, toutes les culpabilités sont égales !
GLORIA. (lui faisant signe.) Par conséquent, personne n’est innocent.
DAVID. (Traversant pour les rejoindre.) Donc –
TOUS. Personne n'est coupable.
Ce syllogisme conduit au totalitarisme, au retour aux idées de leurs pères qui ne sont que des idées tueuses. Sidney Brustein a le dernier mot : « La Vérité ! Si quelqu’un vous contredit, expliquez à cet imbécile qu’il est plus difficile de regarder à travers le chas d’une aiguille que de regarder autour de l’aiguille. La première solution est d’essayer de faire ce que Wally O’Hara a promis. La seconde est de l’oublier et de se conformer à l’ordre établi local. Nous sommes après le discours « I Have a Dream » de Martin Luther King. Le rêve n'est qu'une illusion.
Cela m’amène à une très triste conclusion. À son époque, Lorraine Hansberry rêvait d’un avenir peut-être possible, comme Martin Luther King. Mais aujourd’hui, la reprise de ces pièces laisse penser que le rêve n’a même pas encore commencé à se réaliser. L'histoire a trahi tous les Afro-Américains et ils continueront à mourir dans la rue, abattus par un policier ou une policière, par un suprémaciste blanc, par un simulacre humain, un simulacre qui croit avoir Dieu de son côté, le simulacre. d'un être et d'une situation inexistants, le simulacre d'un trou noir dévorant des Afro-Américains noirs et venant par ici pour purifier cette planète de tout ce qui est noir. Un rêve raciste et chromophobe au nom de la pureté blanche.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
December 23, 2018
3 3/4 stars
November 15, 2025
The play might lack thematic unity but the lead characters are fascinating and the dialogue is always lovely and often brilliant. The play also encapsulates a great many of the dreams of the 1960s. One can only imagine how many incredible plays and other creative works Hansberry would have written had she lived longer.
January 1, 2019
My frustration with this book came in the form of a very long introduction which should have been at the end.
However, the text itself remains relevant for today: a bunch of Bohemians who are not as liberal as they self-righteously view themselves; a conservative, middle class white woman who is an anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist but must wrestle with the fact that she sold her own happiness for comfort; a white prostitute who confesses that even though she and her friends are prostitutes, they are superior to Black men simply because they are white; a politician who coasted to victory with the support of the avant-garde/Communist vote then promptly forgets them; and a dead father from Tennessee whose legacy and ideas still drive his daughters' lives. In short, people are complicated beyond stereotypes.
However, the text itself remains relevant for today: a bunch of Bohemians who are not as liberal as they self-righteously view themselves; a conservative, middle class white woman who is an anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist but must wrestle with the fact that she sold her own happiness for comfort; a white prostitute who confesses that even though she and her friends are prostitutes, they are superior to Black men simply because they are white; a politician who coasted to victory with the support of the avant-garde/Communist vote then promptly forgets them; and a dead father from Tennessee whose legacy and ideas still drive his daughters' lives. In short, people are complicated beyond stereotypes.
May 10, 2019
A total mess, honestly almost unreadable, only brought back for the absolutely brilliant line sprinkled here and there throughout the play. I really liked Gloria's appearance in particular.
It felt like Hansberry had all these things she wanted to discuss through theater, feared she wouldn't have time to explore them all individually before she was too ill to write anymore, so sandwiched them all together in one piece. The result is unfortunately a mess of marginally developed characters, themes, and narrative arcs.
It felt like Hansberry had all these things she wanted to discuss through theater, feared she wouldn't have time to explore them all individually before she was too ill to write anymore, so sandwiched them all together in one piece. The result is unfortunately a mess of marginally developed characters, themes, and narrative arcs.
November 7, 2024
My heart broke. Such a masterpiece. I wish I had seen it in NY. A brilliant piece. It has everything. Some lines hit you so hard you have to read them over and over. It’s astounding her understanding of the human nature and her amazing ability to put it into a creative piece. Beautiful. Heartbreaking.
January 10, 2025
Todo
el
tiempo
se
la
pasan
gritando.
el
tiempo
se
la
pasan
gritando.
February 14, 2025
“Hope is something most men, even thinking men, cling to long after they know better.”
Thank you to my dear friend “Sidney Jenkins” for gifting two of Lorraine Hansberry’s plays to me — specifically her two most acclaimed and sadly the only staged plays during her lifetime, because she died young at only 34 years old from pancreatic cancer. There’s something about that fact that makes this play all the more tragic; however, let me say, it does end in a hopeful beat, which I’m grateful for, but my lord… the costs and devastations.
This play? Absolutely wonderful. The dialogue is scrumptious, and let me tell you, did it really hook me in, especially in Acts II and III; those two acts have these incredible, vicious bouts of dialogue, and the CHARACTERS… aren’t they so fleshed out and so vivid. I couldn’t help but reread passages and monologues because I just wanted to say the words to myself. I’m grateful that Sidney gifted this to me now, because Sidney (the character) has a few monologues that I’d like to add to my arsenal potentially.
I chose Hamlet’s Act II, Scene II monologue to study for the beginning of this semester, and the image of Sidney holding his bottle of pills like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull cracked me up, but was such a provocative, stimulating image for me.
Reading about reception to The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window when it first premiered in the 1960s, I can’t say I’m incredibly surprised to learn that reviews were mixed; perhaps the content of the show was too close to home, too ‘fresh’ for the folks of the time. The New York Times wrote about the 2023 revival (that I wanted to see back when it was both Off- and On-Broadway) and referenced its theme as “the Sin of liberal inertia” — and that is a much more poetic way of describing how I felt about the story, and why I loved it so much.
“Yes… weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again… Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”
This is a play about Jewish characters written by a Black woman; however, I think all races and creeds should relate to the Jewish idea that we just live with the knowledge, we live with the burden, we live with the hardships and brutalities we can’t change. I think this is why we still read Russian Drama and literature — we must suffer, and we must endure.
“So there it is, the trouble with looking at ourselves honestly, Sidney, is that we come up with the truth. And baby, the truth is a bitch!”
There’s so much the characters want to do; big ideas, big characters, big morals. We get high and mighty and we talk a big game, say that we know much more than the establishment or the squares. But when push comes to shove, do we do anything? Do we do enough? Will we ever do enough? Morals take you so far; conviction takes you so far; what do we need to take to make the pain go down easier? Pills? Drugs? Art? Sex? Will anything ever be enough?
What a work. Loved Sidney, Iris, Mavis, and oh poor Gloria; a character who makes so much of an impression and invisibly controls the plot despite only being in one scene of this (relatively) long play. A great magic trick.
Thank you to my dear friend “Sidney Jenkins” for gifting two of Lorraine Hansberry’s plays to me — specifically her two most acclaimed and sadly the only staged plays during her lifetime, because she died young at only 34 years old from pancreatic cancer. There’s something about that fact that makes this play all the more tragic; however, let me say, it does end in a hopeful beat, which I’m grateful for, but my lord… the costs and devastations.
This play? Absolutely wonderful. The dialogue is scrumptious, and let me tell you, did it really hook me in, especially in Acts II and III; those two acts have these incredible, vicious bouts of dialogue, and the CHARACTERS… aren’t they so fleshed out and so vivid. I couldn’t help but reread passages and monologues because I just wanted to say the words to myself. I’m grateful that Sidney gifted this to me now, because Sidney (the character) has a few monologues that I’d like to add to my arsenal potentially.
I chose Hamlet’s Act II, Scene II monologue to study for the beginning of this semester, and the image of Sidney holding his bottle of pills like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull cracked me up, but was such a provocative, stimulating image for me.
Reading about reception to The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window when it first premiered in the 1960s, I can’t say I’m incredibly surprised to learn that reviews were mixed; perhaps the content of the show was too close to home, too ‘fresh’ for the folks of the time. The New York Times wrote about the 2023 revival (that I wanted to see back when it was both Off- and On-Broadway) and referenced its theme as “the Sin of liberal inertia” — and that is a much more poetic way of describing how I felt about the story, and why I loved it so much.
“Yes… weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again… Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”
This is a play about Jewish characters written by a Black woman; however, I think all races and creeds should relate to the Jewish idea that we just live with the knowledge, we live with the burden, we live with the hardships and brutalities we can’t change. I think this is why we still read Russian Drama and literature — we must suffer, and we must endure.
“So there it is, the trouble with looking at ourselves honestly, Sidney, is that we come up with the truth. And baby, the truth is a bitch!”
There’s so much the characters want to do; big ideas, big characters, big morals. We get high and mighty and we talk a big game, say that we know much more than the establishment or the squares. But when push comes to shove, do we do anything? Do we do enough? Will we ever do enough? Morals take you so far; conviction takes you so far; what do we need to take to make the pain go down easier? Pills? Drugs? Art? Sex? Will anything ever be enough?
What a work. Loved Sidney, Iris, Mavis, and oh poor Gloria; a character who makes so much of an impression and invisibly controls the plot despite only being in one scene of this (relatively) long play. A great magic trick.
June 21, 2023
"The world is about to crack open down the middle, and if you don't look, you'll fall into the crack."
Logging this even though I really just saw the revival on Broadway with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, but hell with it I basically experienced the play as a whole and I think it out to count. My short review is that while I might find Raisin in the Sun slightly more consistent, this is Hansberry's more thematically rich work of theater. It may be closer to a 4.5 than a 5 but screw it, I'll average it up.
Aside from how smart and cutting the dialog scenes can get, and the nuance you can read in between so many lines (as was with Raisin), I especially like how Hansberry manages to kind of have her cake and eat it by having it be a social commentary on the 'Artsy' types who see themselves as doing something grand in politics or reporting and so on (and this is what Iris tells Sidney when she sees the proposed design for the font for the paper he's going to create, and that word permeates throughout), while at the same time being a rich text about how as people in "bohemia" (as Hansberry said), a kind of liberal bubble so to speak, people can see things as more important or that a politician can appear to be the answer to what has been your ills.
But the politician will still be corruptible (as O'Hara proves to be), and expectations in relationships can become distorted- or the Woody Allen line of our lives consist of how we choose to distort it- visa vi how Iris tells Sidney her upbringing and dad was one thing, and her sister reveals to Sidney in a moment of candor that... no, actually, their dad was a cultured and well read man and the backwoods thing wasn't just something Iris put on, but that she did because *Sidney* expected it in some sense, like as someone to rescue. Furthermore, as progressive and "radical" as Sidney might fancy himself (not to mention as someone who embraces his Judaism culturally if not religiously), he isnt as progressive when it comes to his significant other (his "people should be insulted more" comment is directed... at Iris, his wife!)
So, What you expect, ie with someone you know being gay, black, a prostitute, well... get over it, you judgmental liberal!
It's very very funny, wonderfully quotable lines, and the final scene is one of the great, eye-opening and emotionally satisfying endings in 20th century American theater. High marks!
Logging this even though I really just saw the revival on Broadway with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, but hell with it I basically experienced the play as a whole and I think it out to count. My short review is that while I might find Raisin in the Sun slightly more consistent, this is Hansberry's more thematically rich work of theater. It may be closer to a 4.5 than a 5 but screw it, I'll average it up.
Aside from how smart and cutting the dialog scenes can get, and the nuance you can read in between so many lines (as was with Raisin), I especially like how Hansberry manages to kind of have her cake and eat it by having it be a social commentary on the 'Artsy' types who see themselves as doing something grand in politics or reporting and so on (and this is what Iris tells Sidney when she sees the proposed design for the font for the paper he's going to create, and that word permeates throughout), while at the same time being a rich text about how as people in "bohemia" (as Hansberry said), a kind of liberal bubble so to speak, people can see things as more important or that a politician can appear to be the answer to what has been your ills.
But the politician will still be corruptible (as O'Hara proves to be), and expectations in relationships can become distorted- or the Woody Allen line of our lives consist of how we choose to distort it- visa vi how Iris tells Sidney her upbringing and dad was one thing, and her sister reveals to Sidney in a moment of candor that... no, actually, their dad was a cultured and well read man and the backwoods thing wasn't just something Iris put on, but that she did because *Sidney* expected it in some sense, like as someone to rescue. Furthermore, as progressive and "radical" as Sidney might fancy himself (not to mention as someone who embraces his Judaism culturally if not religiously), he isnt as progressive when it comes to his significant other (his "people should be insulted more" comment is directed... at Iris, his wife!)
So, What you expect, ie with someone you know being gay, black, a prostitute, well... get over it, you judgmental liberal!
It's very very funny, wonderfully quotable lines, and the final scene is one of the great, eye-opening and emotionally satisfying endings in 20th century American theater. High marks!
June 12, 2023
3.5 Stars for the written play, 4 Stars for the Broadway staging
First, let me get this out. In the essay about this play written by Robert Nemiroff, he states that in 1964 orchestra seats for Broadway plays cost $6.90 on week days and $7.50 on the weekends. What a change in over the last 49 years! (James, you can stop laughing now).
Okay, now onto The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Hansberry has written an experimental play of ideas. There are generous helpings of humor as well as a number of dramatic scenes. At it's core she is asking us to hold onto our ideals, to work for betterment, and to not sink into the hole of indifference, despair or cynicism. Themes Hansberry probes include marriage, compassion, duplicity in politics, racism, and sexuality. Through the lens of 1964, she shows us the Brusteins and their Greenwich Village friends. She asks a lot of questions with which we are still struggling.
My farorite scene in the play is when Mavis, Iris' sister, stops by and has a one on one conversation with Iris' husband Sidney that totally throws him for a loop.
While reading these pages, there were a few places where I couldn't see Hansberry's vision, what she was trying to accomplish or how these scenes could possibly flow together. Anne Kauffman, the director of the current Broadway production which she transitioned from BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), is much less limited than I. This production pulls what I sometimes saw as disparate threads together into a mostly seamless whole. The whole cast is solid with brilliant performances by Miriam Silverman, Rachel Brosnahan, and Oscar Isaac.
I'll let Sidney Brustein sum up here:
"[I] always have been. A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and men change everyday and that rivers run and that people wanna be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is--energy and energy can move things . . ."
First, let me get this out. In the essay about this play written by Robert Nemiroff, he states that in 1964 orchestra seats for Broadway plays cost $6.90 on week days and $7.50 on the weekends. What a change in over the last 49 years! (James, you can stop laughing now).
Okay, now onto The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Hansberry has written an experimental play of ideas. There are generous helpings of humor as well as a number of dramatic scenes. At it's core she is asking us to hold onto our ideals, to work for betterment, and to not sink into the hole of indifference, despair or cynicism. Themes Hansberry probes include marriage, compassion, duplicity in politics, racism, and sexuality. Through the lens of 1964, she shows us the Brusteins and their Greenwich Village friends. She asks a lot of questions with which we are still struggling.
My farorite scene in the play is when Mavis, Iris' sister, stops by and has a one on one conversation with Iris' husband Sidney that totally throws him for a loop.
While reading these pages, there were a few places where I couldn't see Hansberry's vision, what she was trying to accomplish or how these scenes could possibly flow together. Anne Kauffman, the director of the current Broadway production which she transitioned from BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), is much less limited than I. This production pulls what I sometimes saw as disparate threads together into a mostly seamless whole. The whole cast is solid with brilliant performances by Miriam Silverman, Rachel Brosnahan, and Oscar Isaac.
I'll let Sidney Brustein sum up here:
"[I] always have been. A fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet and that the earth turns and men change everyday and that rivers run and that people wanna be better than they are and that flowers smell good and that I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is--energy and energy can move things . . ."
February 11, 2018
The American Masters/PBS documentary, of the legendary playwright and civil rights activist, Lorraine Hansberry, provided a longing to read THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW. Miss Hansberry, an intellect, a precocious talent for writing ahead of her years, captures, in a non-linear time capsule, Greenwich Village bohemia of artists and activists driven by ideals.
I don’t recall watching a production of this play, but I couldn’t help thinking that I saw the opening scene in an acting class in the distant past or that it was a related memory of living on Bleecker Street during my youth, evocative of the longing of a commitment to ideals that are ethereal.
The plot centers on the protagonist, Sidney Brustein, an intellectual, who is searching for his livelihood and winds up a publisher of a local newspaper that his left-wing buddies, Wally and Alton, push a political opinion for an election. Consequently, Sidney hangs a sign of reform on his window. Meanwhile, his wife, Iris, is a struggling actress, socially unconventional, befriends David, a gay playwright. However, she wants Sidney to be practical. Mavis, Iris’s sister, is a matchmaker type and shoves her traditional beliefs onto them. Their personalities clash in the dialogue, which is funny and meaty. The entrance of the prostitute Gloria, who is Iris and Mavis’s other sister pivots into an over-the-top turn of events that is left unresolved. Satisfyingly gripping that the climax is left up to the imagination.
When the play opened in 1964 on Broadway Lorraine Hansberry at age 34 was suffering from pancreatic cancer and facing her mortality, while there were political turbulence and social unrest from the civil rights, women rights and gay rights movements. Her work conveyed through the characters is infused with conflict and meaning born from a personal pain that initiates a yearning to transform, and to care about your life when indifference shows up. The message revealed is to care, and a committed life is worth fighting for.
I don’t recall watching a production of this play, but I couldn’t help thinking that I saw the opening scene in an acting class in the distant past or that it was a related memory of living on Bleecker Street during my youth, evocative of the longing of a commitment to ideals that are ethereal.
The plot centers on the protagonist, Sidney Brustein, an intellectual, who is searching for his livelihood and winds up a publisher of a local newspaper that his left-wing buddies, Wally and Alton, push a political opinion for an election. Consequently, Sidney hangs a sign of reform on his window. Meanwhile, his wife, Iris, is a struggling actress, socially unconventional, befriends David, a gay playwright. However, she wants Sidney to be practical. Mavis, Iris’s sister, is a matchmaker type and shoves her traditional beliefs onto them. Their personalities clash in the dialogue, which is funny and meaty. The entrance of the prostitute Gloria, who is Iris and Mavis’s other sister pivots into an over-the-top turn of events that is left unresolved. Satisfyingly gripping that the climax is left up to the imagination.
When the play opened in 1964 on Broadway Lorraine Hansberry at age 34 was suffering from pancreatic cancer and facing her mortality, while there were political turbulence and social unrest from the civil rights, women rights and gay rights movements. Her work conveyed through the characters is infused with conflict and meaning born from a personal pain that initiates a yearning to transform, and to care about your life when indifference shows up. The message revealed is to care, and a committed life is worth fighting for.
September 26, 2021
1966. Hansberry 1930-1965 [died of pancreatic cancer]
For this play it is of interest to know that Hansberry's husband [later divorced] was Jewish, so one can guess this meant she was in Jewish social circles through him.
Sidney [and his wife Iris?] is Jewish, a journalist of sorts, strongly in favor of political change. He gets very excited about aiding the campaign of a new local man who promises exactly this, yet others warn Sidney that this man will turn out to be just another cog in the existing political machine, and said man admits this explicitly at the end, calling Sidney naive about how the world works.
Another thread is about a friend Alton who is gay and having trouble coming out; also he is [partly] black. Then there are Iris's two sisters, also important characters and very different from the others. Quite a lot of complexity in this play, lots of food for thought, lots of strong feelings and experiences.
My edition [together with A Raisin in the Sun] came out not long after Hansberry's death, and has a forward by John Braine. And a quite long piece by Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's ex-husband [but friend and collaborator to the end] about the play's run on Broadway [end of 1964 into early 1965] during and for a while after Hansberry's dying. It is moving and good to include, but overly detailed for today's readers [how many people attended each performance, what individuals donated money when to keep the play running].
"The 101 'final' performances: Portrait of a play and its author"
I will get more out of the play when I read it a second and third time.
For this play it is of interest to know that Hansberry's husband [later divorced] was Jewish, so one can guess this meant she was in Jewish social circles through him.
Sidney [and his wife Iris?] is Jewish, a journalist of sorts, strongly in favor of political change. He gets very excited about aiding the campaign of a new local man who promises exactly this, yet others warn Sidney that this man will turn out to be just another cog in the existing political machine, and said man admits this explicitly at the end, calling Sidney naive about how the world works.
Another thread is about a friend Alton who is gay and having trouble coming out; also he is [partly] black. Then there are Iris's two sisters, also important characters and very different from the others. Quite a lot of complexity in this play, lots of food for thought, lots of strong feelings and experiences.
My edition [together with A Raisin in the Sun] came out not long after Hansberry's death, and has a forward by John Braine. And a quite long piece by Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's ex-husband [but friend and collaborator to the end] about the play's run on Broadway [end of 1964 into early 1965] during and for a while after Hansberry's dying. It is moving and good to include, but overly detailed for today's readers [how many people attended each performance, what individuals donated money when to keep the play running].
"The 101 'final' performances: Portrait of a play and its author"
I will get more out of the play when I read it a second and third time.
August 7, 2018
The only other play of hers to be produced in Hansberry's lifetime. Somehow it lasted over 100 performances, closed on the day of her death, and never reopened. Would have been a good fit for Off-Broadway, but, given her recent acclaim, they decided to go Big Time.
Nothing like "Raisin". Set in Greenwich Village, Lefties and an odd (and large!) mix of characters, who don't really make sense together. There is one minor character who is Af Am, and he is light enough colored to "pass" if he wanted to (other characters do not seem to realize he is Af Am until they are told).
Given that Hansberry may have been a lesbian, her attitude towards the one gay character is "confusing", at the very least, offensive at the worst. I read this in a collection of plays from the mid '60's, and even there and then, her attitude towards homosexuals was called out.
The Third Act is such a mess it was hard to get through. SO much going on to close out the action of the play! And while the focus should probably be on the death of one of the characters, and the grieving by other characters, they are talking politics!
What I have noticed from this, and "Raisin", is that Hansberry gives *very* specific stage directions. Even to what the audience should see in the demeanor of characters, and glances, and even the music that should be used.
Going to be interesting reading her "later" (unpublished, and probably unfinished, at the time of her early death) plays.
Nothing like "Raisin". Set in Greenwich Village, Lefties and an odd (and large!) mix of characters, who don't really make sense together. There is one minor character who is Af Am, and he is light enough colored to "pass" if he wanted to (other characters do not seem to realize he is Af Am until they are told).
Given that Hansberry may have been a lesbian, her attitude towards the one gay character is "confusing", at the very least, offensive at the worst. I read this in a collection of plays from the mid '60's, and even there and then, her attitude towards homosexuals was called out.
The Third Act is such a mess it was hard to get through. SO much going on to close out the action of the play! And while the focus should probably be on the death of one of the characters, and the grieving by other characters, they are talking politics!
What I have noticed from this, and "Raisin", is that Hansberry gives *very* specific stage directions. Even to what the audience should see in the demeanor of characters, and glances, and even the music that should be used.
Going to be interesting reading her "later" (unpublished, and probably unfinished, at the time of her early death) plays.
February 23, 2025
A slog of a composition not because of any artistic deficiencies on Hansberry’s part. In fact, her seamless ability to blend styles and moods, concepts and realities, is unparalleled among her contemporaries. But the tumult of this part of New York City’s intellectuals in the mid-20th century naturally required people to grapple with the question of social revolution and brace themselves for the changes to come. Thus, observing already pretentious and cynical figures work out these complex feelings and ideas in narrative format is, for lack of a more sophisticated phrase, a LOT. Even so, each character gets their grand soliloquy in a sense, unconventionally achieved with someone else in the room but still qualifying due to the ever-battling themes of loneliness and suffocation throughout the play. When they do, Hansberry’s brilliance at symbolic characterization really shines. Most impressive is how she portrays her titular deuteragonist, Sidney Brustein, with a more honest examination of the deficiencies of the 20th century American man than many of the forefathers of theater were able to do, perhaps due to bias of their own gender. It’s refreshing to have these exhausting and troubled men actually EARN the redemption all of the great playwrights desperately seemed to want to write into them, because this is where empathy lives. Hansberry does it better than most with the conclusion of this play.
October 9, 2024
I wish I had seen the recent 0ff-Broadway production of this play, the second and last play from Lorraine Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun is still much read and taught here in Chicago, which is its setting, a story of one family's struggle with racism through (in particular) housing. Thanks to David for recommending the Sidney Brustein to me after he saw the play. I really liked it, though it has a less focused plot than Raisin, for sure.
Brustein is long, in production almost three hours, set in Greenwich Village, featuring a middle-aged intellectual and his aspiring actress wife and their coterie of interesting friends. It's dialogue-driven, both funny and poignant, a mix of the absurd and social critique, reflecting the Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village of the time. The background is a heated political campaign and reflects a time of struggle we might be able to relate to now between idealism/hope for the future of humanity and cynicism about corruption, racism, poverty. The fragility of commitment to love each other and the world. I'll see it the next time it gets produced here.
Brustein is long, in production almost three hours, set in Greenwich Village, featuring a middle-aged intellectual and his aspiring actress wife and their coterie of interesting friends. It's dialogue-driven, both funny and poignant, a mix of the absurd and social critique, reflecting the Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village of the time. The background is a heated political campaign and reflects a time of struggle we might be able to relate to now between idealism/hope for the future of humanity and cynicism about corruption, racism, poverty. The fragility of commitment to love each other and the world. I'll see it the next time it gets produced here.
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