By Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C.
Last Thursday, I made a long, one-day pilgrimage—D.C. to Manhattan and back—to see the revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. I felt compelled to make the trip because the film version of Hansberry’s award-winning first play, A Raisin in the Sun (the 1961 Sidney Portier/Ruby Dee version), was a formative experience in my life.
I was 9 years old and the film contained my first lesson about racism. I was not taken to Raisin to be taught this lesson; we had no TV until I was 12 and, as a family, we went to the movies a lot. My parents never drew a line between movies for children and those for grownups.
The part of Raisin that has stayed with me since then is the scene in which someone from a white community’s so-called improvement society tries to pay the Black family at the center of the story not to move into his white community. I remember being confused by that exchange, and my father explaining its racism to me.
Because of that memory, I have felt an emotional connection to Hansberry’s work ever since and couldn’t miss the opportunity to see the revival of her second play. I was not disappointed.
While Raisin is a serious drama centered on institutional racism and one Black family’s various dreams for their future, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, set among bohemians in 1960s Greenwich Village, is a satire aimed at the wider society.
Alternating between sharp wit and pathos, Brustein pokes sardonically at progressive pretensions, political corruption, prejudice against interracial relationships, the forced roles of women, and the tendency of different oppressed groups to snipe at each other rather than show the empathy that recognition of their similar situations should engender.
The play’s overarching themes, though, are action vs. apathy, and idealism vs. cynical compromise.
At the play’s start, Wally O’Hara, a professed reformer, seeks Sidney’s support in the local political primary, including the placement of a sign—DOWN WITH BOSSISM! O’HARA FOR REFORM—in Sidney’s apartment window. But Sidney, who has just bought a small, failing newspaper, doesn’t want any part of politics.
Alton, Sidney’s Black Marxist friend, declaims, “There it is man! The great disease of the modern bourgeois intellectual: ostrich-ism. The great sad withdrawal from the affairs of men.”
In response, Sidney expresses his fatigue with fighting for causes and the petty concerns of many so-called activists:
“Since I was 18, I’ve belonged to every committee to Save, to Free, to Abolish, Preserve, Reserve and Conserve that ever was. And the result—is that the mere thought of a ‘movement’ to do anything chills my bones! I simply can no longer bear the spectacle of power-driven insurgents trying at all costs to gain control of—the refreshment committee.”
But Wally and Alton persuade Sidney that Wally is fighting to do more than “diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones.” Wally points out that their neighborhood is the second largest narcotics drop in the city, that the syndicate acts like it owns the neighborhood, and the cops are on the take. Sidney puts the sign in his window and puts his newspaper behind Wally’s campaign.
Wally wins the primary. But it is a hollow victory, as the innocent, idealistic Sidney discovers that Wally only won the primary because he sold himself to the corrupt political machine.
Wally defends the betrayal of his principles, claiming that to get anything done you must go where the power is and he can now get needed stop signs, better garbage collection, and a new playground. Wally will just tinker with the edges of small change and won’t fight for the big needed changes as he originally had campaigned to do.
Wally now wants Sidney to keep his newspaper out of politics—to stay in the realm of ideas, music and writing on the arts and leave “the world” to the Wallys. He declares that his victory in the election is a foregone conclusion. Wally threatens that if Sidney opposes him and his backers, the newspaper won’t last more than six months.
But finally, Sidney is going to fight. He says: “You have forced me to take a position…Just not being for you is not enough. To live, to breathe—I’ve got to be against you.”
When Brustein opened in New York in 1964, the critics were not impressed. Perhaps, they expected Hansberry to deliver another Raisin, and were not willing to accept a satire falling outside that dramatic box. Or perhaps they couldn’t handle Hansberry’s expansion into critiquing our society as a whole.
Ordinarily, the critics’ reactions would have killed the play. But the theater community–producers, directors, writers and actors–championed it.
Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft took out several full-page ads defending the play against the critics. They acknowledged that initially they had only “joined the cause for Lorraine Hansberry,” who was fighting a losing battle against pancreatic cancer even while making notes to enhance her play. (The playwright died at age 34 in 1965.)
Based on the critics’ reactions, Brooks and Bancroft did not expect the play to be good. But they wrote that, to their shock, “It was a wonderful play.” They added, “In our opinion…BRUSTEIN…is a more mature and compelling work than Miss Hansberry’s award-winning A Raisin in the Sun.”
I’m not sure Brustein is more compelling than Raisin, but I do believe it is the earlier play’s equal. And Brustein’s message is as important today as it was when first produced—perhaps more so. With the never-ending corruption of Trump, his cohorts, and his would-be successors—from his right-wing minions in Congress to the hack judges Trump installed and the media propagandists disseminating his lies—democracy is on the line as it never has been before.
This assault on so many fronts can be overwhelming, and the resulting exhaustion can make one wish to withdraw from the fray. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—a play for our times as well as its own—is a rousing call to forego “ostrich-ism” and join the battle.
The current production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, starring Oscar Isaacs and Rachel Brosnahan (Mrs. Maisel), will be playing at the James Earl Jones Theatre in New York through July 2nd.
Political columnist Jessie Seigel had a long career as a government attorney in which she honed her analytic skills. She has also twice received an Artist’s Fellowship from the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her fiction, and has been a finalist for a number of literary awards. In addition, Seigel is an associate editor at the Potomac Review, a reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books, and a dabbler in political cartoons at Daily Kos. Of this balance in her work between the analytic and the imaginative, Seigel jokes, “I guess my right and left brains are well-balanced.” More on and from Seigel can be found at The Adventurous Writer, https://www.jessieseigel.com.
I so enjoyed this piece. I saw this play at BAM (before it transferred), and although I had read it previously (and all of her work), I was so thrilled to see it performed live (the run was sold out at BAM). Thanks for this thoughtful and interesting essay!:)