The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

Sidney Brustein is a disillusioned Greenwich Village intellectual who reluctantly allows a political campaign sign to hang in his apartment window. What follows is a play about whether it is possible to stay engaged with the world when the world keeps disappointing you.

Why This One

This is Hansberry’s second and final staged play, and it is a very different work from A Raisin in the Sun. Where her first play is focused and domestic, this one sprawls across Greenwich Village bohemia, touching on race, sexuality, politics, corruption, and the exhaustion of trying to care about all of it at once. It opened on Broadway in 1964, and audiences expecting another Raisin were startled by its ambition and scope.

The play’s central question, whether cynicism is just a comfortable way to avoid responsibility, feels as urgent now as it did then. Hansberry wrote it while dying of cancer at thirty-four, and there is a ferocity to its insistence that giving up is not an option.

What to Expect

A talky, passionate, sometimes messy play. The dialogue crackles with intellectual energy and the characters argue about everything from art to politics to what makes a marriage survive. It is looser and more ambitious than A Raisin in the Sun, and some readers find it even more rewarding.