How a Text Exchange Between Jeremy O. Harris and Rachel Brosnahan Led to the Broadway Transfer of ‘The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window’
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When I reach Jeremy O. Harris, he’s about to be whisked upstate to celebrate his birthday. And this one is hitting a little harder than others, and not just because, like all birthdays, it’s a blaring reminder of all the mileage that’s been accumulated. No, it’s because Harris is turning 34, the same age that Lorraine Hansberry, the brilliant, barrier-atomizing playwright behind “A Raisin in the Sun, was when she died in 1965.
“I feel aligned with her spiritually,” Harris, who took the theater world by storm with his 2019 Broadway debut, “Slave Play.” “We both went to Broadway for the first time when we were 29 years old. And right now, I’m thinking that my life has been so short, but it’s so much richer because of what she has done for the theater.”
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This year, Harris has played an integral role in helping to shift the cultural conversation around Hansberry’s legacy by helping to arrange a last-minute transfer of an acclaimed revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it had a sold-out run this spring, to Broadway for a whirlwind 10-week engagement. The goal is to remind people that Hansberry’s body of work extended beyond “A Raisin in the Sun.” Rarely produced, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is a challenging, provocative look at a Bohemian couple in Greenwich Village, whose affection for each other curdles, along with their idealism.
“America needs this play,” says Harris. “It speaks to our moment. And I haven’t seen this type of deeply detailed classic American writing on Broadway like this for awhile, and I haven’t seen it from a Black femme queer woman. I want high schools around the country to know that Lorraine Hansberry’s imagination was bigger than ‘Raisin in the Sun.’ I want to see a production of ‘Sidney Brustein’ in nearly every regional theater.”
But if “Sidney Brustein” ever achieves that kind of ubiquity it may have all started with a text message between Harris and Rachel Brosnahan, who stars in the revival alongside Oscar Isaac.
“I was texting with Jeremy asking if he was going to make it out to BAM to see the show and he let me know that he was abroad doing a writers retreat, but he said something like ‘tell me there’s going to be another life for it,'” Brosnahan remembers. “And I told him that I didn’t think so and we were nearing the end. And he wrote back: ‘I’m going to make some calls. I’m going to get you to Broadway.'”
Harris quickly enlisted some producing vets, such as Sue Wagner and John Johnson, and set about finding a theater. Space is always a precious commodity on Broadway, but the James Earl Jones Theatre had unexpectedly become available after a stage adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room,” was postponed indefinitely after financing collapsed. In another bit of kismet, Brosnahan and Isaac’s busy schedules freed up.
“The whole thing happened so organically in ways that none of us could ever have planned,” Brosnahan says. “I had a project that fell apart and the same thing happened for Oscar, as well. Suddenly we were both available. The whole cast was available. The timing just worked out.”
Not everything went smoothly. The decision to transfer was so abrupt that the play’s set (a Manhattan apartment) was being struck as the new theater was being secured.
“The apartment sits on a steel structure and that was all thrown away and there’s a fire escape that was in a dumpster,” remembers Johnson. “One of the walls fell apart as they were taking things down. But all the set dressing was there and we were able to claw back a lot of the steel and salvage the fire escape.”
At a time when Broadway is still struggling to regain its pre-COVID footing, Johnson believes that what the producers managed to pull off could be a model for others. If other shows falter and space becomes unexpectedly available, perhaps more Off-Broadway productions can make the leap?
“In this post-pandemic time, we have to think about different models and sometimes that means we have to act faster,” he says.
A few things were different when “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” made the trek across the East River. Most notably, it was roughly 10 minutes shorter.
“It doesn’t seem like that much to cut, but it made a huge difference,” says Anne Kauffman, the play’s director. “We took it to roughly two and hours and 45 minutes, down from nearly three. That was big and it was seismic and it was felt and appreciated by the audience.”
There were other hurdles. To qualify for Tony Awards, the production had to ensure that they had done eight shows before the nominators met at the end of April. That meant that the first preview of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” on April 25 was performed in front of press and Tony voters. It paid off. The play was nominated for best revival with Miriam Silverman, who plays the prim sister of Brosnahan’s character, earning a best supporting actress nomination (Isaac and Brosnahan, however, were snubbed — a casualty perhaps of the accelerated qualifying run). But the team was eager to work quickly because it meant introducing the show to more people on an even bigger stage.
“It felt like our work wasn’t done yet,” says Kauffman. “This play feel like it’s a masterpiece that was lost in plain sight. This piece of Lorraine’s legacy deserves another chapter.”
Most critics embraced the show, and it has attracted some big name fans, such as Steven Spielberg and Sarah Ruhl (who wrote Harris an email saying she was surprised that none of the reviews focused on the plays central point: “capitalism makes whores out of all of us”). And while it’s true that Hansberry’s play examines how money corrupts art and politics, in the case of the revival, the short run means that nobody will be making a profit.
In some ways, what happened with Harris mirrors how the artistic community lifted up Hansberry’s show after it initially opened to scathing notices in 1964. At that time, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks took out an ad urging people to see the play for themselves, and other artists like James Baldwin trumpeted the production as an unfairly maligned masterwork. It went on to play for more than 100 performances. Harris says he was motivated to elevate Hansberry’s lesser-known work to make sure that Broadway isn’t stuck in a never-ending cycle of reviving and remounting plays by the same handful of writers.
“With writers like Lorraine, we’ve gotten their A-sides, but we don’t get to see their B-sides,” Harris says. “But we get the A, B, E, F and G-sides of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. We need to make a real push to uplift some phenomenal work and reshape what we’re seeing in our canon.”
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