Isaac, Brosnahan top sparkling cast in Hansberry revival

To see “The Sign NEW YORK — in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is to experience the remarkable breadth of Lorraine Hansberry’s vision. “A Raisin in the Sun,” her 1959 masterwork, looms large in one’s memory throughout this windy, wonderfully sprawling play, because, as in the encounter with any great writer, you are entranced by the range of the artist’s curiosity and imagination.

This lesser-known work is receiving the vibrant airing it deserves, courtesy of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and director Anne Kauffman. She shepherds a sparkling cast of eight, led by Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, through the early-’60s personal and political travails that unsettle the marriage of Isaac’s Sidney and Brosnahan’s Iris. Through this intimate prism, Hansberry develops a layered manifesto, about the urgency of abandoning political neutrality and disrupting the status quo.

Kauffman, who first directed a revival of the play in Chicago several years ago, has herself called it an unfinished work. Others familiar with its history use the word incomplete; efforts to refine it have involved adding to and subtracting elements from the 1964 Broadway production, which closed two days after Hansberry’s death in January 1965. (Subsequent tweaks to the script were spearheaded by her former husband, Robert Nemiroff, who headed her literary trust.)

The process culminates in BAM’S Harvey Theater in a somewhat bulky but altogether fascinating tragicomedy, exploring the political crosscurrents of the time. Racism, antisemitism, feminism, cronyism and socialism are just some of the -isms that arise over the three-hour play, set in the Brusteins’ Greenwich Village apartment.

If “Raisin in the Sun” is a landmark drama for its depiction of the hostility encountered by the first Black family to move into a white Chicago neighborhood, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” is harder to categorize. It’s a funnier, rangier and in some ways more ambitious play that gives its central character attributes both magnetic and off-putting. For even as Sidney engages in admirable battles, he’s also capable of thoughtless cruelty toward Iris, a struggling actress who takes her husband’s reflexive put-downs to heart. That keeps audiences off balance: Are we meant to root for Sidney, or the marriage, to succeed?

The ambiguities may confound some spectators. They’re what I loved most. Hansberry places her specimens under an acute social microscope, not so much for us to identify with, but to be considered timely vanes in the winds of change.

The sign of the title is a campaign poster for Wally O’hara (Andy Grotelueschen), a glad-handing candidate running for local office on a reform platform against the party bosses. Sidney, who has just wangled a deal to buy (on credit) an arty neighborhood newspaper, at first rejects Wally’s entreaties for an endorsement. But Sidney quickly reverts to his idealistic instincts and agrees to back him. One of the play’s weaknesses is failing to address this abrupt turnaround; it’s an early “sign” of some narrative wrinkles in the plot.

The rewarding gallery of characters who pass through the Brusteins’ modest walk-up go a long way to enriching Hansberry’s construct. Iris and her sisters, Mavis (Miriam Silverman) and Gloria (Gus Birney), make for a compellingly diverse sorority.

In counterpoint to Brosnahan’s well-drawn, insecure Iris, chafing at Sidney’s overbearing protectiveness, Silverman superbly embodies the eldest sister, a snooty Upper East Side busybody who looks down on Black and Jewish people. Her second act speech about her own surprising sacrifices is one of the production’s high points. Birney’s Gloria, the youngest and most troubled sister, arrives late in the play, to complete their Greek father’s notion of his family enveloped in classical tragedy.

Glenn Fitzgerald, as the Brusteins’ upstairs neighbor, a gay playwright; Julian De Niro, as a Black proletarian who asks Gloria to marry him; and Grotelueschen are all blessed with meaty supporting roles. And Raphael Nash Thompson has an amusing scene, playing a bohemian painter who comes up with eccentric mockups of newspaper mastheads. They’re all dressed with a dazzling eye for the period by Brenda Abbandandolo.