So here comes an extraordinary play, a drama so infused with emotional intelligence, linguistic treasures and the human conditions of dread and longing that it keeps you bolt-upright in your seat for nearly three hours. It is a play penned by surely the greatest dramatic writer ever to emerge from Chicago, a genius from the South Side who would have dominated the American theater of the latter half of the 20th century had she not died of cancer at the age of 34.
It is a play I doubt you have ever seen, certainly not produced at this level. And in that ignorance lies some of the astonishing force of what happened at the Goodman Theatre on Monday night, during the revelatory opening of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a masterpiece lost in plain sight.
One thought will come rushing into your head as this play, superbly directed by Anne Kauffman, roars its way into your consciousness: How could this play not be famous?
Here’s why. Hansberry, who was dying in the final weeks of rehearsal as “Sign” was preparing to open on Broadway in 1964, had written “A Raisin in the Sun,” a masterpiece in its own right but still the kind of structurally conventional, memoir-infused play that the Broadway establishment had expected a young African-American to one day write for it (so long as it also did not threaten Broadway’s liberal audiences). With “Sign,” white, male critics in New York in 1964 simply could not get their heads around a black woman from Chicago showing such extraordinary range.
Hot on the heels of “Raisin,” Hansberry was writing not about a domineering mother and a shiftless son, moving to a different neighborhood in a distant, racist city, but of the fevered souls of white Manhattan liberals. She was peering at the insecurities of the struggling people of the theater, the art world and the nascent alternative media — living in Greenwich Village and fighting for progressive societal change and personal happiness, only to find the one as elusive as the other.
So for the most part critics dismissed the play. History now proves them dead wrong.
Subconsciously, I’ll wager, they felt threatened. Here was a writer who could throw around references to Margaret Mead and Joan Baez, Fidel Castro and Jean Genet, Willy Loman and Daniel Boone, who could spit out a line like “You like the wrong part of Thoreau.” Here was a playwright who was a master of dramatic structure but would not let it contain her. Watching this piece Monday, it felt to me like Hansberry herself — whose work, as you may have noticed, I deeply admire — was about to bust out of her own play half a century after her death, an Englewood High School graduate posthumously receiving the key to the city of her youth. Her presence is that vivid in Kauffman’s loving production.
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Satirical, political, wise and deeply moving, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” belongs in a peer group that includes the roughly contemporaneous works of Edward Albee, although its heart beats with less cynicism and more hope and compassion. Booze flows through the work of both writers — so much so that Hansberry’s main characters, a publisher and agitator named Sidney (the excellent Chris Stack) and an actress named Iris (Diane Davis, in a simply extraordinary performance), are not unlike more youthful versions of Albee’s George and Martha.
This play is a portrait of a young marriage similar to Hansberry’s own. It is also a work about being in your 20s or early 30s and feeling like you are not really getting anywhere.
“I’m 29,” Davis’ Iris laments, fresh from her shift slinging hash, “and I want to know that when I die more than 10 or a hundred people will know the difference.”
Not surprisingly, Hansberry was thinking about dying young. Not surprisingly, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is suffused with mortality and melancholy. Events are based on Hansberry’s own post-Chicago life among West Village intellectuals. But she was ill. Her life was not ordinary — not that there was anything ordinary about Hansberry even before she got sick.
It is a play that seems to understand men with notable profundity, but it is also a work with a feminist consciousness. Hansberry is very clear that Sidney cannot make Iris happy, love her as he does. She will have to achieve that for herself.
“In this world,” notes Iris’ bourgeoise sister, Mavis (Miriam Silverman), “there are two kinds of loneliness. With a man and without one.”
So “Sign” is a portrait of a ragtag community feeling the force of societal change. Which is true of many plays, of course, but this group of bohemians is observed with such detail, and directed with such ruthless incision by Kauffman, it feels at times like you are watching the fourth season of “Mad Men” — only Hansberry, unlike Matthew Weiner, really was there.
The characters in the play are mostly young: Hansberry also writes about an artist, Max (Phillip Edward Van Lear); a gay playwright, David (Grant James Varjas); a romantic young man named Alton (Travis A. Knight), a politically engaged, light-skinned African-American who can pass for white, when he wishes, maybe; and about Iris’ sister Gloria (the sad-eyed Kristen Magee) a call girl, albeit a classy one. Alton is in love with Gloria. That does not go so well.
During the play, Sidney falls for a seemingly progressive political candidate named Wally O’Hara (Guy Van Swearingen), even erecting a supportive sign in his window. Alas, Wally turns out to be bought and paid for, a sell-out whose arguments are all pragmatic. In the play, he represents the death of idealism, the expedient choice, the crushing of the idealistic dream.
He never feels like a New Yorker. Any viewer of this play with some history in Chicago will immediately intuit the origins: Hansberry really was writing about the Democratic machine in Chicago — the racist one that stood in the way of her own Washington Park family. Van Swearingen, whose noggin is more than a little evocative of the Daley brand, clearly gets that.
Kauffman’s deftly cast production is staged on a huge setting by Kevin Depinet that feels infused with the chaos and fragility of the moment — characters can climb to the roof of its skeletal structure and howl their passions at the urban moon. The visuals point to a time when La Vie Boheme still was possible in the West Village, and yet you also feel the boutiques, eateries and the other frippery of the 1-percent closing in, even in 1964.
Sidney still could publish a newspaper, but it already was perceived as folly.
“A newspaper?” says his wife. “When are you going to grow up?”
Never, one feverishly hopes as one watches Stack play a man choosing between drink and dreams, ever more aware of his own impotence. Young supporters of Bernie Sanders will be fascinated by this play. So will Clintonesque pragmatists and triangulators. The non-bohemians get their say: “There are no squares,” observes the uncompromising Silverman’s Mavis, married to a rich man who has women on the side. “Everybody is his own hipster.”
True, that.
But it’s just one of many profound truths in a play that’s part time capsule and part soothsayer. Hansberry’s health meant that the play was not revised in the way it would have been had she been well enough to shape and finalize her many drafts. There would have been some cuts. Viewing this play now, you can see where they would, and probably should, have been made. For a tighter, more polished theatrical experience.
But I’m just glad we’ve got this whole wonderful, messy, restless, beautiful thing.
“The world is about to crack down the middle,” Sidney says at one point, making a last-gasp effort at warning his friends and family that sides will need to be taken.
Stack carefully underplays the line, but it doesn’t matter. Shivers still go down your spine.
For in 1964, a dying literary genius from Chicago knew what was coming.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
“The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” – 4 stars
When: Through June 5
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes
Tickets: $25-$75 at 312-443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org
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