The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, David Geffen School of Drama 2024

2023–24 SEASON STUDIO PROJECTS

MAY 2–4, 2024 DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean Florie Seery, Associate Dean Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean Nancy Yao, Assistant Dean

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

By Lorraine Hansberry Directed by Tamilla Woodard

Creative Team Production Dramaturg

Lara Sachdeva Fight Director

Michael Rossmy Stage Manager

Ellora Venkat

Cast

in alphabetical order Gloria Parodus

Sidney Brustein

Iris Parodus Brustein

Mavis Parodus Bryson

Max

Wally O’Hara

David Ragin

Alton Scales

Rosie Victoria Chloe Howard Amrith Jayan Francisco Morandi Zerpa

Grayson Richmond Anna Roman

Michael Saguto Darius Sakui

Content Guidance

This production contains depiction and discussion of drug overdose; the use of racial and other identity-specific slurs; offensive stereotypes of Indigenous American culture; and discussions of suicide and assault.

There will be a 10-minute intermission.

This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.

Artistic Assistant Director

Marlon Alexander Vargas Rehearsal Stage Manager

Caileigh Potter

Production Associate Safety Advisor

Timothy “TJ” Wildow

Associate Production Manager

Shannon Dodson Run Crew

Micah Ohno Miguel Angel Lopez

Administration Associate Managing Director

Jake Hurwitz

Assistant Managing Director

Jeremy Landes

Management Assistant

Iyanna Huffington Whitney House Manager

Yale acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.

We also acknowledge the legacy of slavery in our region and the enslaved African people whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the business of Yale University as well as the economy of Connecticut and the United States.

The Studio Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.

Maura Boseman Production Photographer

Maza Rey

David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.

Special Thanks

Lauren F. Walker, Andres Orco Zerpa

THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION FUND, established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.

“Looking for Lorraine” reads the title of Imani Perry’s 2018 biography—“For some time now…I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life”—the epigraph from its elusive subject.

An examination of Lorraine Hansberry’s written oeuvre reveals a simulacrum in stuff put down.

A Raisin in The Sun—her best-known work and the first full-length play by a Black woman to be staged on Broadway—sees the self as source. The discrimination faced by the Black Younger family as they attempt to move into a white Chicago neighborhood indirectly recalls that experienced by the Hansberry family years prior.

But what of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window? Regarding its 1964 Broadway premiere, scholar Steven R. Carter describes critics’ “surprise,” “outrage,” and “disappointment” that Lorraine Hansberry’s second protagonist “was Jewish rather than Black.” A Greenwich Village resident since the early 1950s, the playwright sought to depict a familiar multiethnic milieu. Hansberry’s point of view is informed by “life-long experience…observing white people as a DuBoisian, pan-Africanist, communist activist married to a Jewish man,” writes American studies scholar Nicole GuidottiHernandez. Sidney Brustein’s 1960s Greenwich setting subsequently opens a figurative window into a very real post-war Village scene.

“It is my belief that [Sidney Brustein] fills in something of a genuine portrait,” writes Hansberry. The picture is rarely pleasant, and yet, it bears a clear signature. Lorraine is omnipresent. “She cast her lot with the working classes and became a wildly famous writer. She drank too much, died early of cancer, loved some wonderful women…. She was intoxicated by beauty and enraged by injustice,” writes Perry. The same qualities are visible in Brustein’s Window. Lorraine Hansberry breathes through every character: the bohemian who lives with chronic abdominal pain; the artist who wants to make it in the theater; the Black revolutionary writing for the newspaper; the gay playwright verging on wild fame; the woman who dies too soon.

The days leading up to Lorraine Hansberry’s death in 1965 are well documented by her ex-husband and enduring collaborator Robert Nemiroff. As the curtain rose on Sidney Brustein for 101 performances, Lorraine Hansberry found herself in and out of the hospital. Even so, she took great care, leaving in her final production a way to grieve in her wake: “I hurt terribly today,” Sidney tells us, but “that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things.”

Lorraine’s “is a life we’ve seen before,” writes Perry, “familiar enough that we can imagine it.

Midcentury interracial couple, activists, bohemian, artistic—it falls apart, but something remarkable always comes of it: brilliant children or great art.” We see this familiar story once more in the fallout of Sidney Brustein. The remarkable thing, then, is what comes of it. Lorraine gives us this, too. Sidney’s final commitments call back to her own work as an activist, holding staunchly to her beliefs in spite of oppressive vehicles trying to stymy her protest. The presence of students across the country gathering in solidarity with Gaza is one proximate indication: the call is relevant now as ever before.

—Lara Sachdeva, Production Dramaturg