[image]
[title]Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are well known to mass audiences for their roles onscreen: Brosnahan for her title role as a rising stand-up comic in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Isaac for films ranging from the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis to sci-fi blockbusters like Dune and the latest Star Wars trilogy. But both of them got their start on the stage, and have returned to it periodically over the years—including a revival this year of the 1964 drama The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the sweeping final work by A Raisin in the Sun playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
In this production—which moves to Broadway this week after a hit run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—Isaac plays Sidney, a restless progressive trying to make his mark in the bohemian West Village, and Brosnahan is his wife, Iris, a would-be actress racked by her own frustrations.
In a recent chat at a café on Bleecker Street, the actors discussed the production and their characters, and how the play still has much to say to contemporary audiences.
What was it like performing this show at BAM, and do you expect it to be different on Broadway?
Oscar Isaac: What I loved most about BAM is it was right around the corner from my house. It was like the neighborhood playhouse that happened to be a world-renowned theater. Also, the space itself is so special; it’s this beautiful amphitheater but at the same time a proscenium stage. I’ve seen so many shows there in the 20-plus years I’ve been in the city, so it was exciting to get to do one. But I’ve never done Broadway before, and this feels, even just from tech [rehearsals], incredibly different: The audience is much closer and we’re not as high off the floor as we were. It’s a different energy.
Lorraine Hansberry was dying of cancer while completing this play, and there have been revisions to it through the years. How are you and the director, Anne Kaufman, dealing with that?
Isaac: It is a bit of an unfinished piece; [Hansberry] didn’t really get to be a part of the rehearsal process, so she was sending notes through her ex-husband [producer Robert B. Nemiroff]. Anne has been with this play for such a long time, and we would revisit different iterations of it: the 1964 version; the version that Nemiroff worked in in the ’80s and ’90s, with [Hansberry’s] notes; and what Anne worked on in Chicago [in a 2016 production at the Goodman Theater]. We found a new version based on all those existing ones.
The play examines bohemian life in a different time. Did aspects of it resonate with you, as actors? Your character, Rachel, actually is an actor.
Rachel Brosnahan: It’s always exciting to play passionate people, and to be a part of something that pushes them to their limits. Every artist knows what it feels like—to feel like you’re turning yourself inside out for the work, and to feel like you’ve been made to feel small in the process, and like you’re giving so much to something that doesn’t always feel like it’s giving back to you. Iris and I are very different in the way that we approach life and work, and that’s been one of the most fulfilling parts of getting to play her: She’s someone who is so deeply moved by everyone and everything around her and has no trouble expressing that.
Oscar, I read an interview where Anne Kaufman described your character as a Jewish Hamlet. You played Hamlet fairly recently. How was that experience?
Isaac: I played Hamlet kind of like a Jewish Hamlet, too, come to think of it. It’s very tiring, but it’s also very nourishing, because it feels like an athletic thing. Being on stage is more like playing music live—it’s the same song, but every night is a different investigation, and it gives you a different energy back.
What about Sidney spoke to you?
Isaac: His misogyny speaks to me—really! There’s something amazing about watching the characters in this play transgress in major ways. Public transgression is an important part of society. The stage is a place where this flower of evil is allowed to come forth—what Antonin Artaud [conceptualized as the] theater of cruelty, this place where darkness is given light. It’s a very important thing for people to be able to see that, because of the freedom that elicits, and the catharsis.
What does this play have to tell audiences today, in our own time of cultural and social unrest?
Brosnahan: I think we’re having a lot of big conversations now about apathy, and disillusionment with the systems that keep our world functioning. That feels very present in this play. Sometimes it feels like Lorraine was seeing straight into the future, knowing that we would be having these same conversations about race and gender and politics and art—what it means to be alive, and what our responsibilities are to each other as people, and to the greater good.
See Isaac and Brosnahan in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window at the James Earl Jones Theatre starting April 25 through July 2.