[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Tonight is the Broadway opening of the revival of Lorraine Hansberry's, one of her final plays, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. The curtain will go up tonight at the James Earl Jones Theatre after an acclaimed run at BAM earlier this year. That production earned Drama League nominations this week for both lead actors, its director, and for outstanding revival of a play.

The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is sometimes described as the play that got away and a largely unrecognized work from a legendary playwright. The original New York run in 1964 lasted just 101 performances. Lorraine Hansberry died from cancer a few months later at the age of 34 after making history as the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway, A Raisin in the Sun.

The current version of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window stars Oscar Isaac in the title role and Rachel Brosnahan as his wife, Iris. They're a married couple with progressive ideals living in 1960's Greenwich Village. The marriage is passionate but fraught. Judgments are made, lies are told, friends and family aren't who they claim to be. It examines what happens when values are challenged and when authenticity is questioned.

Lead actor Rachel Brosnahan and director Anne Kauffman joined me while the show was at BAM, and now that it's moved over to Broadway, we wanted to bring you that conversation again. I started by asking Rachel about her character and how she lives her life in the context of the West Village in the '60s.

Rachel Brosnahan: Yes, they're a part of this bohemian scene in the 1960s, Iris and Sidney. They have this apartment that is the center of their universe. People come in and out without knocking sometimes, and no one's got keys. They are performing bohemian as much as they're living it. I think you see that in the way that they dress and the kinds of conversations that they have. Lorraine, I think, both embraces that scene. It was something that she was a part of. It's a scene that she recognized and also levels some fair criticism at it too.

Alison Stewart: Anne, what is interesting to you about this neighborhood and this time?

Anne Kauffman: We did a lot of research, both when I did it in 2016 at the Goodman Theatre and even more so here. It almost feels like a whole new play with this cast and with the research that we delved into this time. The neighborhood itself was run by an Italian political arm. It was largely an Italian neighborhood. The Bohemians "were invading" at that time.

It was a really, really mixed and diverse place, all walks of life. Their entertainment really was getting together in Washington Square Park and singing and talking and arguing. I was thinking about that question at what's 1964 versus my friendships now is I feel like we're so polite with each other and these folks are just not polite in a really refreshing way. Also, the language is very different now than it was then.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, to bring our audience into the conversation, can you explain what the sign in the window is of the apartment that Iris and Sidney share?

Rachel Brosnahan: Well, the sign in the window is a sign in support of the political campaign of a friend of theirs, a gentleman named Wally O'Hara. The sign is the subject of much debate. What does it mean to endorse somebody? What does it mean to hang a sign in your window that lets everybody know how you feel about something? It feels less about the specific campaign, I suppose, although it is a big part of it, and more about what it means to put your name on something and to scream and support in that way.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, when you read the script for the first time, how would you describe what does Iris wants from her life?

Rachel Brosnahan: That's the question that Iris is asking herself in this very moment when we meet her. We've often talked about this play as being a play about passing in more ways than one. I think we meet Iris at a moment of transition where she's realizing the ways in which she isn't as happy as she thought she might be with the life that she's living. She wants to be an actress. She wants to make it. That's not really coming to fruition.

She's working in a restaurant serving pancakes, and she's seeing some of the holes in her marriage and her relationships and some of the sheen that maybe had, I don't want to say blinded, but muted her vision, I suppose, for a while is starting to fade away. She's asking herself that throughout the entire play and begins to find an answer, I would say, by the end.

Alison Stewart: Anne, as you mentioned, you directed this in Chicago in 2016 but you'd been thinking about this play for a long time, about bringing this play back. When you first read the play, what were your initial impressions, and then as you've worked with it over this period of time, how has your impression of it evolved?

Anne Kauffman: When I first encountered it, I was 19 or something in college and I did one of Iris's monologue very poorly, one of the reasons I decided to get into another part of the theater not acting. I really felt at that time, and that was in the 1980s, I felt like it was an old-fashioned play. Then I came into context with it again, probably about 10 or 11 years later when one of my students at NYU undergrad directing students wanted to do it for her thesis.

I thought, how crazy is that, that she's going to take this dusty play and want to do it? Then as I was sitting watching, because I was mentoring her on it, I was just totally struck by the relationship between Iris and Sidney and its complications that you can't really define it. It's not clear where they are in their process of being together and where they are in their process as individuals. I really, really, really felt a kinship with their marriage in my own marriage at the time.

I say I've grown up with this play, so I have changed. As I get older and change and have more experiences, et cetera, the diamond that is the facets of the diamond of this play, different facets shine at different times. I feel we are at a moment now where it's like a perfect storm, I would say, of conditions both where we are politically and socially, culturally, and where I am as an artist as well to take up the mantle of this piece again and to really give it a go and to really show what this piece is made of.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, this relationship between your character, Iris, and her husband Sidney, there's a tension that exists between them. What is the source of the tension initially?

Rachel Brosnahan: Well, it's a number of things, but I think the predominant source of that tension is that they're both dreamers who, for a number of reasons, have lost faith in each other's ability to achieve their dreams. That's a really difficult pill to swallow. I think they've stopped believing in each other and they want to believe in each other, I think, but it's driving a wedge between them.

Iris says at some point, "Our fighting is different now." They've always fought, they've always been people who argue and challenge each other and make each other crazy, but it's also hot and fun and funny, and something is changing and not for the better when we meet them. It's something that they're trying to navigate to [unintelligible 00:09:11] of success.

Alison Stewart: The character is 29 years old, an aspiring actor living in New York. Sounds familiar. [chuckles] What, from your own professional journey or your memory, has been helpful in understanding how Iris is feeling?

Rachel Brosnahan: Oh, gosh. The crippling insecurity and imposter syndrome is very familiar and it never goes away. Iris and I are so different and it's been one of the great challenges of discovering this role within this play. It's one of the things that I really admire about Iris and I think one of the things that Lorraine admired and was also very cautious about and critical of in all important ways, this vulnerability that Iris has.

For Lorraine, I think that was the vulnerability of white women in a way that Black women were not allowed to be. Iris is an inside-out person. She wears her insides fully on the outside, and it makes her squishy and soft and gorgeously expressive in a way that has been a challenge to access but a welcome one. [laughs] I'm very familiar with the feeling of wondering whether or not on a day-to-day basis you can get through.

Alison Stewart: Anne, Iris's family backstory is important to the play. Can you share a little bit about the dynamic between the sisters and how you thought about directing characters for sisters?

Anne Kauffman: Well, I come from a big family of sisters. There's five of us girls and a boy. It's one of my favorite things about this play is the love and how different these sisters are. Also, there are different versions of their upbringing, and their memories, they seem contradictory when, in fact, I really, really think that there's a lot of truth in that. Again, the span between my sisters-- There's 10 years between the oldest and the youngest, and that's a lot of years.

When I was casting this, Mavis is someone who comes from the 2016 production, and I just knew when Rachel was the person that I thought, "Oh my God, Miriam and Rachel are just going to have-- they're so different." In fact, in real life, they're opposite in a weird way. I feel like Mavis is playing who Rachel is in terms of her ambitions and her practicality and Rachel is playing the whimsy that is Miriam.

Then we brought in Gus. It was a no-brainer when she auditioned that I was just like, "Not only do Rachel and Gus look alike, but they have this vulnerability and the sweetness to them and the strength of Mavis." I love the Venn diagram of sisters, and it was really a pleasure to have the three of them get together and just talk about what their shared history is because not all of them are on stage together. That's a really interesting conceit that Lorraine plays with.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, your partner in this play, Oscar Isaac, he's playing Sidney. What is the conversation you had with Oscar that really affected how you thought about presenting that relationship on stage?

Rachel Brosnahan: We both have had a lot of conversation about it and also not. I think we've both been leaning a lot into intuition and the work we've individually done on these characters because there is a lot that they keep from each other. That being said, we had a lot of really great discussions during the first readings of this play. We had this great gift of a week in December to spend together doing work around the table. Yes, we had a lot of discussions about what we think their history looks like and what exactly it is that they're fighting about moment to moment.

Alison Stewart: Anne, what works about the chemistry between these actors, Rachel and Oscar?

Anne Kauffman: I was thinking about the question you just asked Rachel, and I think it's true they may not have talked about the play precisely, but watching them when they're not on stage, they spend a lot of time together which is very rare when I'm working on something that doesn't involve Sidney or Iris. I really enjoyed giving them time just to play by themselves. I'm not even talking about on the play but just they have a really easy relationship.

Both of them have a great sense of humor and they rib each other a lot. Lots of times I'm just letting them continue on the sidelines doing some things before getting them back into rehearsal to get that playfulness and that relationship into the work. They respect each other and they're a ton of fun together, and I think that's a huge part of what makes them work.

Alison Stewart: Sidney is not the most likable person. I'm just going to say it out loud. [laughs]

Rachel Brosnahan: Are any of them? No?

Alison Stewart: Good point. He's very sure he has all the answers. He's very sure he knows how to be a Bohemian, how to be progressive, and he kind of learns his lesson later on. What challenges does that present you as a director, Anne, when you have a character who we need to follow, we need to invest in, but sometimes it's just, "Ah, that guy"?

Anne Kauffman: It's all in the casting, honestly. I've done readings of this play where the guy playing Sidney has zero sense of humor and it's deadly. He just can't do the play. I really feel for 15 years I've been searching for my Sidney, and when I heard Oscar read it the first time-- I was really ready to give up on this play just because Sidney is exactly what you described. He's also everything.

I always talk about him being like Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel. He has to be a leading man and a clown and super smart and super quick and also have a very, very profound soul and the sort of bottomless pit of despair. That's a hard combo platter to find, so when I heard Oscar read it for the first time, I am not a weepy person, but I sort of wept because I hadn't realized how at arm's length I had kept the play for the past few years because I couldn't find a Sidney.

I'll tell you, Oscar is so charming and so funny and so lovable, and I think that the key to him is his own self-criticism and his own vulnerability. He says to Iris, "I don't know why I do that. I don't know why I say those things too." I think it's a real question he has. To really reduce it, I think he's going through a midlife crisis. Everyone in this play is going through a transition. He's having a real crisis that he doesn't even recognize it's 1960s. He pokes fun at therapy but he really needs it. I think that his questioning of himself at times is the way to our hearts.

Alison Stewart: When you're thinking about Lorraine Hansberry, the author of this play, it's mostly white characters obviously raising a son without a Black family trying to integrate a neighborhood. When it debuted, writers spent a lot of time talking about this, talking about race. As somebody who spent a lot of time with it, Anne, and Rachel, as you're coming to it more recently, what do you think Hansberry was trying to explore about white progressives? Do you want to take that first, Anne?

Anne Kauffman: Yes. I feel really emotional about it because I think she's so incredibly smart about it. She was married to a white progressive, a Jewish man. We can be easily led to believe that Sidney is Robert Nemiroff when, in fact, Sidney is very much Lorraine. I think that the most beautiful thing about Lorraine is that she speaks about humanity. Right now, the problems are that we are separating ourselves but she doesn't believe in that as a notion.

She has a lot of faith in human beings and the ability to better themselves. What she's saying at the white progressive at that moment, and I think a lot of us feel that right now, is that the idea that white progressives do a certain amount of work and achieve a certain something and then think they're done or they get tired. We get tired. He says, "I'm tired. I have experienced the death of the exclamation point. I can no longer abide by the fight for the refreshment committee."

Of course, it's not a refreshment committee, we're talking about people's lives, and this is also something that he is realizing. I think her community of Black artists really experience the knocking down and having to get up each day. I think that white progressives and this particular group, I'll say, because that's who she's aiming her sights on, can wake up the next morning and go like, "Oh, that was amazing. Good job. I'm finished." I think that's what she's trying to say in the fight for a whole humanity. You know what I mean?

Alison Stewart: Yes. Then there's this one lone Black character in the play.

Anne Kauffman: Who passes for white. Yes, tries. [crosstalk]

Rachel Brosnahan: [unintelligible 00:20:08] reductive so much of the initial conversation around this play as if this community wasn't also Lorraine's. She's also writing from her own experience as in some ways she did with A Raisin in the Sun. She was a part of this community and she's present, as Anne said, in so many of these characters. She comes through each one of them in different ways through the questions that they're asking, the challenges that they're facing. I'm continually inspired.

As I said, I had this privilege of spending this week digging dramaturgically into this play in December. One of the other things it felt like she was frustrated by was her fellow artists giving over to despair. Edward Alby certainly was one of those artists that she was very frustrated by who makes his way in here in the form of David. It becomes clear through this play and through all the criticism she's leveling and through all the questions all of these characters are asking that, as Anne said, she does believe deeply in people's ability to change and invites them to feel something real, to push apathy and despair aside and feel something that moves you to action.

If we've done our jobs with this play, hopefully, audiences feel moved to some kind of action, big or small but feel a pressure to not just sit idly by and talk and talk and talk and not do anything.

Alison Stewart: It can't go without saying, Rachel, that the character that people know you from on television, Midge Maisel, kind of coexisting at this time with Iris in New York. Would they have ever run into each other, do you think?

Rachel Brosnahan: I've been asked this question a couple of times and I think the best I can say, they're so polarly different. [laughs] I think Midge might be closer to someone like Mavis.

Alison Stewart: The sister.

Rachel Brosnahan: Yes, Mavis, the older sister. Maybe there's a world in which Iris and Sidney would be one of those gaslight sets, but apart from that, they are living in completely separate worlds. I learned a lot. It turns out about salad making from working on the marvelous Mrs. Maisel and what a 1960s salad might look like that has made its way into this play.

Alison Stewart: Everything happens for a reason.

Rachel Brosnahan: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How's my conversation with actor Rachel Brosnahan and director Anne Kauffman about The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window which opens officially on Broadway tonight? The 10-week run follows. The show is sold out off-Broadway revival at BAM.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.