I Saw the Sign

At BAM, Anne Kauffman directs the first New York revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, whose original Broadway run closed the day the playwright died, at 34, of pancreatic cancer. Nearly fifty years of history have both burdened and recast The Sign’s subject matter. Sidney (Oscar Isaac so in character I almost forgot it was him) and Iris (Rachel Brosnahan, lovely but still bearing an unfortunate twinge of Mrs. Maisel in her mannerisms) are a Greenwich Village couple in the early ’60s, negotiating their political commitments (leftish), individual desires (lofty), and personal histories (leaden). They grasp at their future until a tragedy snaps the present into place. The script’s political and artistic references have aged unevenly, but its concern with the inconsistencies between what we want and what we do is as fresh as ever.