Julieta Cervantes
The sign in Sidney Brustein’s window, in Lorraine Hansberry’s play of the same name, is one which supports a liberal New York politician, Wally O’Hara, who ultimately turns out to be no good. And what the sign stands for—ideals defiled and made redundant—are at the heart of Lorraine Hansberry’s second Broadway play, which premiered in 1964. It followed her smash success—and the play she remains best-known for—A Raisin in the Sun, which the Public Theater mounted a near-perfect revival of last year.
But whereas what the latter said about race remains piercing and universal today, “Sidney Brustein,” presently revived in an all-star production at BAM (to March 24), feels very much of its time, and dustily lost in it too.
Hansberry died far too young at 34 just months after “Sidney Brustein” premiered on Broadway. It features a majority-white character set and cast, a bunch of allegedly cool cats in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s; and its concern is to show the depth and also frail pieties and concerted whining of the white ‘60s liberal. It is both merciful and merciless in this respect, and it is beautifully written as a piece of text. But it is a grating snooze of a play; it ponders, meanders, stalls, and ultimately gets stuck in its own plot-free thicket of words. Its characters circle each other, and its arguments do the same. Dramatically, it is rambling and unsatisfying.