This play traces the lives of a handful of Greenwich Village Bohemians approaching middle age in the early 1960s. Whether in electoral politics, their romantic lives, or in their intellectual commitments, their failure to live the lives they had expected introduces psychological turmoil and interpersonal conflict.
I agree with Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune, who identifies Hansbury’s mastery of dramatic form while retaining the ability to play upon formal expectations as one of the chief pleasures of this play. By some measures, its parameters follow the conventions of familiar genres. Hansberry’s characters allude frequently to forms from Greek tragedy to 1960s “happenings.” For example, Sidney Brustein’s wife Iris and her two sisters each have different desires that shape their lives in satisfyingly schematic fashion. At times, however, the play is unpredictable and experimental in a way that does not feel self-indulgent. A dreamlike sequence featuring Gloria, Sidney, and David inventively and effectively communicates the intense stress the characters undergo, and it breaks the play’s generally restrained tone. Yet this rupture is earned through painstaking character development and management of the audience’s formal expectations.
Another of this play’s virtues is its deployment of Shakespearean language. Hansberry performs this borrowing unobtrusively, allowing characters to slip seamlessly into higher realms of eloquence. For example, my favorite scene, a revealing conversation between Sidney and sister-in-law Mavis, concludes with Sidney grasping Mavis by the shoulders and channeling Iago: “Witness, you ever-burning lights above…you’re tough, Mavis Parodus.” This moment typifies the play’s extraordinary complexity. What does it mean for Sidney to speak Iago’s words here? How might linking our protagonist to Shakespeare’s most inexplicably villainous creation change our understanding of the play and of Sidney’s complicity in the approaching tragedy? Unlike the Goodman’s numbingly middlebrow revival of Smokefall last year, the answers to such interpretive questions are genuinely elusive.
This production’s performances do sufficient justice to the complexity of these characters. Chris Stack as Sidney and Diane Davis as Iris present a relationship at a realistic precipice. The contempt they feel for each other is complexified by moments of real tenderness. Grant James Varjas as the gay playwright David excellently produces his character’s misanthropy and desire for attention. The only aspect of the play the really disappointed me were Max (Phillip Edward Van Lear) and Alton (Travis A. Knight). Max felt simply underused in this play, offering an affectionate satire of contemporary art, but disappearing early in the play, never to reappear. Alton is granted the play’s most devastating monologue—a beautiful and disturbing meditation on race, pride, and deprivation—but his character never develops the depth and ambiguity developed by most of the other characters. Unlike, say, Mavis, Alton is pretty much exactly who he initially appears to be.
Though I am loath to reduce such a complex play to a central theme, I believe that Hansberry’s central preoccupation is the question of how to react to failure and disappointment: cynicism? Or an increasingly tight grip on idealism? The titular sign represents Sidney’s desire to choose the latter—to boldly declare his belief in a political candidate that promises what Sidney calls “real options”—but by the play’s ending, the costs of this belief and commitment are all too apparent. This is a good production of a work of genius: formally inventive, moving, intellectually challenging, and timely for a nation now in 2016 struggling to live by its principles amidst failure and disappointment.
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