Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan never imagined their revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window would make it to Broadway. “It happened so fast,” Brosnahan told Vanity Fair over the phone. “It felt like whiplash, but the fun kind.” In a separate phone call, Isaac shared a similar sentiment regarding their production, which was supposed to end at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March: “It’s serendipitous.”
“A project I was going to do didn’t come together in time, so it fell apart, opening up a window,” Isaac says, pointing out the whims of the universe that allowed Sidney Brustein to make it to Broadway. “The fact that the theater happened to open up, and it was at the James Earl Jones [Theatre]—a beautiful synchronicity. It wasn’t willed into being. It wasn’t this designed idea. It’s a thing that kind of took its own momentum.”
A sense of momentum, of urgency, is at the heart of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s window, the second and final Broadway play written by trailblazing playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who, in 1959, became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway with, arguably, the greatest American play of the 20th century, A Raisin in the Sun. Perhaps the urgency inherent in her second play—which details the difficult marriage between Isaac’s intellectual Bohemian Sidney Brustein and his aspiring actor wife, Iris, played by Brosnahan—could be traced back to the fact that Hansberry herself was running out of time. On January 12, 1965, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, just two days after the original Broadway run of Sidney Brustein closed.
Despite Hansberry’s tragically short life, she left an indelible mark on American theater with A Raisin in the Sun, which has received multiple revivals, including Tony Award–winning productions starring everyone from Sean Combs to Denzel Washington, and most recently at the Public Theater this past fall. However, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window has existed more under the radar, having only been revived once on Broadway in the ’70s since its initial production that starred Gabriel Dell and future EGOT Rita Moreno. “For me, it was a bit more of an academic idea,” Isaac says of the play. “I read it in school. I had seen some scenes from it. I was very moved by it, but it remained a little bit of a museum piece for me.” Brosnahan admits that she’s “embarrassed to say that I had never heard of this play before I was asked to do a reading of it,” despite being “intimately familiar with A Raisin in the Sun.” “I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to become familiar with the rest of Lorraine Hansberry’s extraordinary legacy left behind after such a short life.”
Thankfully, Hansberry’s work can reach new audiences thanks to BAM’s production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window transferring to Broadway at the last possible moment. Brosnahan points out that it wouldn’t have been possible without Slave Play playwright and Sidney Brustein producer Jeremy O. Harris, who, via a series of text exchanges with Brosnahan, was instrumental in helping the play find a life beyond BAM. “He wrote, ‘Let me make a call or two,’ and that was at 2:26 p.m.,” Brosnahan explains, reading the texts aloud. “And I said, ‘That would be incredible.’ Then, at 2:36 p.m. he said, ‘Okay, I’ve done a call about bringing your show to Broadway.’ And I said, ‘You work quick.’”
In that 10 minutes, a show that was supposed to close in March began its journey to a 10-week limited run on Broadway, a run that would also mark Isaac’s Broadway debut. Since graduating from Juilliard in 2005, Isaac has spent the majority of his career onscreen, starring in massive franchises like Dune and Star Wars, as well as TV series like Marvel’s Moon Knight. “It’s completely different,” says Isaac of acting onstage rather than the screen. “Now, it’ll be two years since I’ve been on a set. So I’d had a lot of space away. My first acting gig back being theater did feel quite organic. I think there was a bit more willingness to fail and risk failure and risk things being bad, I guess, in order to find something new, in order to investigate a new way of working.”
And even now, as they near the end of their limited run, on July 2, not every night feels all that great. “Last night, elements felt awful. But, in some ways, it was really exciting,” he tells me. “I found certain reactions weren’t there for me, like, my own reactions, things that have been built into the structure of the play. They just weren’t coming easily, and instead of forcing those things to happen, I just allowed whatever it was to be.” Brosnahan—who recently wrapped up her fifth and final season of the Emmy-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—agrees with Isaac that theater “is a completely different kind of challenge,” and says that it’s “one that I’m hooked on.” “Theater is my first true love, and it was the perfect way to close one chapter and open another one,” she says.
Chris Murphy
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