Her line, “The things you people think you have to talk about!” was greeted with a ripple of appreciation by the audience this critic sat in. Silverman as Mavis, who may be perceived as the interloper for her conservatism, is the most welcome presence on stage. Alton tells Iris that she talks about not caring if he us “blue, green, purple, or polka dot,” but that she should think about what that means, as they are “not an option” to him as a Black person in a racist society. His blind spots and ignorance-around his imploding relationship with Iris, his liberal politics, the Black man he works with, and the gay man upstairs-are plentiful. He wants her to care, he wants everyone to care, yet professes not to be political or fight for political change with his new publication. He derides Iris for her attitude of “live and let live,” of not-caring their upstairs neighbor David (Glenn Fitzgerald) is gay. Post the failed not-nightclub, Sidney’s new mission is to launch an artsy newspaper that will deliberately exclude politics, claiming he has “lost the pretensions of the campus revolutionary.” Yet everything he says and does in the play shows that he has not. “I am 29 and I want to begin to know that when I die more than ten or a hundred people will know the difference.” She will “shrivel up and die” if she has to sit through more of the group’s political noodling. She parries well herself when he questions the quality of the therapy she’s been having, she says, “I just called you a sadistic, self-satisfying son of a bitch to your face-instead of just thinking it.” Iris felt she was “the luckiest girl in the world” when she met Sidney, but now that isn’t enough. “Why don’t you just hit me with your fists sometimes?” she asks him. He objectifies his wife as his “mountain girl,” derides her acting skills, and diminishes Iris with pointedly vicious zingers, which he doesn’t seem to realize cause the damage they do. But Sidney’s right-on persona barely conceals more traditional sexist parts of Sidney’s behavior. They have chemistry, and enliven the play with physical crackle, whether dancing, stretching, or falling on to couches. Isaac and Brosnahan capture the couple’s slinky sexiness and smarts whatever problems they have, they are extremely attractive and hot for each other while having it. “Who wants a piece of a non-profit nightclub?” Iris wonders. The production begins with a good joke: Sidney himself is emerging from a failed business venture where people could listen to “good folk records.” “It wasn’t supposed to be a nightclub,” he is forced to say over and over again to the very funny derision of Iris and others, like a young Black compadre, Alton (Julian de Niro). Dramatically, it is rambling and unsatisfying. Its characters circle each other, and its arguments do the same. 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. It is both merciful and merciless in this respect, and it is beautifully written as a piece of text. 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. Hansberry died far too young at 34, just months after Sidney Brustein premiered on Broadway. 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.īut 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. 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. 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.
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