By Michelle Lyu
This year the Brooklyn Academy of Music brought Lorraine Hansberry's lesser-known masterpiece and last play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window to the stage for its first major New York revival since its original production in 1964. The vigorous initial seven-week run was a storm, drawing immense critical reception and a sold-out, attentive audience. Sign then announced a transfer to the James Earl Jones Theatre on Broadway for 80 final performances before closing this summer.
Director Anne Kauffman had stated, “We are in dire need of Hansberry’s voice." The production was exciting and beautiful, emerging from a village of steadfast leadership and unyielding dedication, but especially for its anchorage in the spiritual center of Lorraine's courageous imaginary.
Lorraine's ideas -- sharp, ironic, smart as ever and conveying great love and possibility for the American people — so concretely alive by this year's New York revival of Sign constitutes a historic endeavor. It is worthwhile to establish and clarify the significance of her ideas for our moment.
The world of Sign is a world of ideas and contradictions that shine light on the moral, social and political life of the American condition. Originally set in the West Village of the '60s, the play's lifeworld has been recaptured in today's Brooklyn -- where much of the play's production cast, including the leading actors, resides — a parallel neighborhood of history, culture and cosmopolitan newness that makes it a battleground of ideas and a kaleidoscope for the American future.
“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant–birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so–and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths–change in the sense of renewal.
But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not–safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope–the entire possibility of freedom disappears.”
— James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in My Mind, 1962
“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is an immersion into the lifeworld of the bohemian intelligentsia of 1960s Greenwich Village. It first debuted in 1964 on Broadway at a moment in history when a new world order was dawning. The Civil Rights Act had been passed and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” was recorded that same year. China and Cuba had freed themselves from Western colonialism, and Africa was on her way to liberation.
In this surging moment, Lorraine described herself as a part of the postwar generation who had inherited the attitudes of existential despair à la Sartre and Camus. This philosophical inheritance of elegant abstraction had left many among her cohort critically unprepared to face the splintering world of the mid 20th century. As history was breaking, how would abstract ideas meet the concrete moment for the young progressive?
Sign is “a play about ideas,” wrote Robert Nemiroff. The play’s dramatic complexity reflects a daring and honest expression of the American condition. It is a call to Americans to meet their task–as Baldwin said–to face their history so that they might change it, advance the genuine development of American society, and in that process to join the forward march of the rest of the world toward human freedom. It is to undertake the process of moving from the moral abstract into the moral concrete, which the arrival of historic responsibility demands of us.
This is the process which someone like Anthony Bourdain sought to shoulder, in his creative establishment of a new brotherhood with the world’s people via civilizational values, and it is also why he was respected and beloved by all. It is this collision of the abstract moral with the historical concrete that appears in the brewing 2024 presidential campaign, drawing serious bids from historically unique and unprecedented candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump and Cornel West. A new America and a new American people are emerging.
When the play first opened, Lorraine wrote of the original inspiration as a friend who had been harshly reprimanded for hanging a political sign in her window–same as Sidney does, and the play’s namesake. Her friend, who did not pander to political trends per se was “the unlikeliest person in the world to be found locked in some pointmaking struggle with big‐city politics.”
And so her resistance to removing that sign is remarkable, serving as some canary in the coal mine of broader consciousness. This Greenwich Village moment had been touched by and refracted a change in world conditions — which the American artist and intellectual would need to rise to meet.
“It stopped being preoccupied with my friend's quaint character to a point where she dropped out of the play altogether to be replaced by another character who, more and more, as the play became obsessed with the problem of political commitment in general, came to dominate the work. That character's name was, through a process of evolution, Sidney Brustein.”
How would a political commitment be made by this man? Sidney is a contradictory, purposeful and sensitive individual who is not a white man in today’s language so much as a white American progressive of his moment. He is stubborn, sometimes exactingly present and sometimes egregiously out of touch with common reality. Frivolous, excessive, precise, brave and beautiful–he is unpredictable in the way that human beings are, and hence he is also full of surprise and most importantly, of human possibility.
Sidney Brustein is damned by his lack of a certain historical grounding and discipline needed to determine what his concrete contribution will be. He possesses also a lack of courage and maturity to honestly examine his life, the people he loves, the people this nation has produced–and thus himself. He is an archetypal Greenwich bohemian who has inherited the assumptions of American whiteness: That one is free to dream but is not responsible to the larger pulse and progress of history, which can be achieved by any single person only when he is morally situated in the breadth and groundswell of humanity.
Sidney then fulfills his elegant endeavors by opening a folk nightclub in the way our metropolitan cities, today otherwise deindustrialized and poor, continue to unnervingly sprout polished coffee shops from corner to corner, given by the patron not because it is so much what the world needs but because it is what the soothing of someone’s inner world desires. Meanwhile Iris, in her desperation to make it and be known, even at the cost of personal dignity, becomes a commercial actress. Their lives are spiritually untenable.
Only after the extreme act of his younger sister-in-law Gloria killing herself are Sidney and Iris awakened from their delusions. Sidney realizes that finally, he is responsible. To Gloria, to Iris, to all those whom he loves or attempts to love, but really to himself, and really, to life. This is both the anchorage and liberation he needs if he is to survive as a human being. But what a price is paid to reach the point that Sidney and Iris are capable of each facing their independent corruptions. What, which is present in American society that permits the death of a young Gloria to take place, today manifests in the suicide and despair of our youth, in the opioid addictions of millions, in the plight of poor workers and in the death of human spirit of the many who have consigned their lives to pessimism, decadence and selfishness.
That “Sign” has been revived for its first major New York run in sixty years is a valuable contribution given the moment. Lorraine’s play should be welcomed as a moral apprehension, an education for that American who has so sorely lost his way. It would also be a mistake to attempt to understand the play through the framework of identity politics. The characters, who are interestingly mostly white, taken in our contemporary context are not just white people today. The inheritance of assumptions and attitudes which have constructed the blind spots of Iris, Mavis and Sidney, left them lost or emptied in some way–the achievement of whiteness, in a phrase, has in the last sixty years been opened up to people of any race and lineage in this nation via our universities, our art, culture, publications and professions. The aspiration to whiteness, this disastrous confusion and ignorance of history which produces a myth-driven life, has become pervasive in the imagination of Americans irregardless of color or creed.
“Sign” is a play that is speaking to more Americans than would comfortably like to receive the message.
And “Sign” expresses the possibility of healing and redemption for these Americans. They have been invited to the “welcome table” as Baldwin calls it–the opportunity to live a sophisticated life of safety without the baggage of moral reckoning or awakening, one that is so desperately needed when war and poverty actively devstate the lives of millions at home and billions abroad. It is not one’s fault, but it is one’s responsibility and redemption. To strive, as Sidney does, to know the truth and to be renewed.
“Sign” is a unique contribution to the development of America and the world, not as a record so much as a script for what must be accomplished for our renewal as a people. The task is to fulfill our country’s original promises of democracy and freedom, to forge an America that can meet the standard of the new world order that has continuously been emerging — from 1789 France, 1917 Russia, to the freedom of Africa and the rise of Asia today. Really, to become a nation for its own people and the world’s people.
The achievement of our nation calls upon ordinary people, who are ambivalent, hypocritical, stormy and yet, just as they are reliably contradictory, they are reliably human, beautiful and noble–and these are essentially the characters of the play–to see themselves as capable of making history. This transformation will draw upon the legacy of the American Revolution, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and will finally complete their aspirations.
This is the right moment for the play’s revival, which is a challenge, what must become so that this nation will not remain a state and democracy for the few, but will become a nation that serves humanity. Lorraine left us with a blueprint for freedom with “Sign.” Performed with courage and discernment of the truth, it deepens the capacity of the American people to finally determine their moral commitment to humanity in the wake of a world that is breaking, so that a greater one may emerge. It is descriptive of the transition from a postwar period of confusion and despair into a moment preemptive of colossal historical, intellectual, social and moral transformation, what history demands of the American who has chosen safety, and how that American is still capable of being better than he is. To become the person who knows, as Sidney does in the final act, that “Death is waste and love is sweet and the earth turns and men change every day.”
Michelle Lyu and is a visual artist and school district employee living in Philadelphia. She is a member of the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation.
