The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window - by Lorraine Hansberry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the award-winning author of A Raisin in the Sun, one of the most electrifying classic masterpieces of the American theater, for the first time in a stand-alone print edition, revised and restored.

First staged in 1964, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is the probing, hilarious, and provocative story of Sidney, a disenchanted Greenwich Village intellectual, his wife Iris, an aspiring actress, and their colorful circle of friends and relations. Set against the shenanigans of a stormy political campaign, the play follows its characters in their unorthodox quests for meaningful lives in an age of corruption, alienation, and cynicism. With compassion, humor, and poignancy, the author examines questions concerning the fragility of love, morality and ethics, interracial relationships, drugs, rebellion, conformity, and especially withdrawal from or commitment to the world.

A milestone in the American theater, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice.

Review Quotes

"Rich and warm and funny and varied ... beautifully written."
--Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published and produced in some 30 countries, while her film adaptation was nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death, her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In 1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les Blancs, her last play--posthumously performed on Broadway and recently in prominent regional theaters--has been hailed by a number of critics as her best.