Episode 104: Elise Harris Helps Us Look Into "Sidney Brustein's Window"

Introduction to Lorraine Hansberry

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. Lorraine Hansberry's story is often framed as one of tragically unrealized potential. Her landmark play A Raisin

0:30in the Sun was the first work by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and it quickly became a key part of the canon of American drama. But, as the narrative goes, her subsequent dramatic output

Hansberry's Life After Success

0:42was curtailed by her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. As our guest today reveals, that is by no means the whole story. Elise Harris chronicled the history of Hansberry's next major play, The Sign in Sydney Brewstein's Window, for American Theatre Magazine earlier this year. The article appeared at the same time that a high-profile revival of the play, starring Rachel Brosnahan and Oscar Isaac, came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, garnering positive reviews and

1:12new attention for this lesser-known work by Hansberry. Elise is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, and Harp and Altar. And she joins us to talk about Hansberry, The Sign in Sydney Brewstein's Window, and the underappreciated legacy of one of America's most important playwrights. Elise, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Your article, The Play That Got Away, A History of the Sign in Sydney Brewstein's Window, begins in the aftermath of Hansberry's success with A Raisin in the Sun. And there are a few

1:44surprising things that you mentioned right off the bat. For instance, could you tell us about the reaction to Raisin and how that maybe surprised her and informed her approach to developing the sign in Sydney Brewstein's Window?

Reaction to A Raisin in the Sun

1:57Sure. The vast majority of responses to Raisin were very positive. And the play was a huge success, made a lot of money. It was optioned to become a film. She became a celebrity. However, it started a period of intense self-doubt for her, which I think might be very counterintuitive for a lot of your listeners. She really didn't trust this response, this big hit response. She felt white audiences were really misreading the play and projecting a lot of misunderstanding on it.

2:32But publicly, she was just a huge celebrity and a big success. Privately, she did receive a lot more criticism. So Black writers who were friends of hers or acquaintances started to really quite directly communicate that the play was not necessarily as simple of a success as it seemed. Her friend, William Branch, who was also on the left with her and had been produced a play at the Greenwich Muse and was heavily involved with playwriting, he wrote her a letter implying that she understood the limitations

3:05of the white audience and catered to it in a way that they all had to do. So it was really like, well, we all know that we have to taper things down a little bit for this audience. You clearly took that into account with Raisin. And then Leroy Jones, who would later be Amiri Baraka, he sent her a letter as well. And part of an exchange, he was asking her to participate in a panel. But in one of the letters, he said, you know, the only reason the critics liked you is that you come from a middle-class background. You wrote this very middle-class play where there's homeownership involved and you like kind of grafted it onto a working-class family, you know, implying that

3:39she's a bit of a useful idiot for the system, right? So that was a very rough couple of letters.

Hansberry's Personal Life

3:46And then on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from a lot of the corporations and media industry, she was not getting success. So she had written a play called The Drinking Gourd for NBC, for their centenary of the Civil War. That was never aired. She'd written a far more politically engaged version of Raisin for Columbia Pictures, but Columbia Pictures did not want to do this more political version of a screenplay. That was scrapped and they just basically filmed the play as it had

4:18been. So she was getting these very conflicting pressures. And even though she was extremely strong minded, she didn't really listen to what anyone else thought necessarily, they were still there in her head. And then other variables that made the six years after Raisin difficult didn't have to do with Raisin, but were equally impactful on her life. So I would say the number one problem was isolation. Anyone who is as politically astute as she is going to be alone, is going to feel alone. It's a very

4:51small community of people who put that much effort into understanding the world. And she lost Louis Burnham, who had been, I would say, a father figure for her for about 10 years. And she came to New York in 1950. He died in 1960. And her private life was in disarray. She is estranged from Philip Rose, who had produced Raisin, because he had apparently not quite done what she wanted on the movie. And she was physically isolated up in Westchester County. So about an hour, an hour and a half from a lot of

5:23her friends. And politically, she was dislocated. So she had been on the black left and in the CP, or I don't think she was a card carrying member, but she'd been deeply embedded in different kinds of CP and labor youth league circles. But that was all really dissipated after the secret speech after 1956. And she hadn't yet found her way to SNCC. So she had no political home. And as the illness encroached, probably starting in 1962, and really diagnosed in 1963, she was experiencing symptoms without

5:56understanding where they came from. So she was much less able to write, castigating herself about this. And in that torturous position of not understanding why she was maybe having problems with focus. She was also taking Darvon and tranquilizers for the pain. And those, she knew at the time they hurt her work, but she was in physical pain. So what was she going to do? And the last part of this kind of illness variable is that Jane Wagner said that fame had hurt her. She had a really strong

6:29reaction to becoming famous that Jane Wagner said she had seen other people have. It can be really unsettling and confusing and frightening for people, I think, how differently everyone reacts to you. And Wagner felt that that had really thrown her off.

Hansberry's Relationship with Jane Wagner

6:44Yeah. You mentioned the playwright Jane Wagner. And as I understand it, this is a pretty underreported aspect of Hansberry's life. Around this time, she's in a relationship with Wagner. Could you tell us a little bit more about that and maybe how it affects our understanding of Hansberry? Sure. Wagner was one of several people in relationships with Hansberry. Hansberry remained married to her husband, Robert Nemeroff, who she loved very deeply and was very tied to professionally. So the kind of maybe space sometimes you take either during a breakup or a divorce to get sort of a,

7:19some of your own standing on your own ground. She wasn't really able to do that because professionally they were so intertwined. Hansberry was also seeing a woman named Dorothy Sekuels, who was 15 years older than her, an executive at a candy company, and somebody who was also a stabilizing force in Hansberry's life, much like Nemeroff. However, Hansberry had two patterns, two emotional patterns in her life. She loved having these stabilizing people like Nemeroff and Sekuels. She really needed them. And she was also always entranced with a third person, typically a different type of

7:53person who maybe was elusive and mysterious and perhaps sending mixed messages or confusing messages. And I think that that pattern helps you understand the last six years of Hansberry's life a little better. Wagner was, I would say, very hip and very stylish. And so she would sometimes laugh

The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

8:13at Hansberry a little bit. They had this loving, a lot of jokes about things. And Hansberry was, you know, politically minded, a member of Daughters of Bilitis, had a lot of also left-inflected questions about sexuality and why do people become gay. And she was sort of noodling over this a lot. And Wagner says that she would make fun of her because she basically thought that was naive and square. And that whole, an interest in gay politics would have been very uncool in that group. But Wagner loved Hansberry despite it and would just kind of rib her about it.

8:47And I learned that, you know, some of the things are just daily life. Wagner told a story about Hansberry trying to cook dinner for her and that Hansberry was no good at cooking and the meal turned out terribly. Wagner said it was not the kind of meal you used to do someone with. And that became a running joke for them. She also mentioned that they drove around in a car together up in Westchester where Hansberry had this second home. And then there was a frightening evening where Hansberry realized she was being followed in the car. So then Hansberry would drive around and around trying

9:20to lose whoever it was following her because Hansberry did not want the person to know where she lived. And this must have been in 1962 and it must have been very close to when Hansberry moved there. So it could have been an FBI person. It could have been just a menacing individual. But what it tells us about Hansberry is that she really panicked. She really became very, very emotionally vulnerable. For Wagner, that was a big newsflash because Wagner had only seen this polished, professional, perfect version of Hansberry. She had to be double extra plus perfect for media and for their

9:53social world. And so it was a big 180 to see how vulnerable she could be. Another dimension of Hansberry's life was that she was part of a network where the spoke of the wheel was a woman named Gloria Sapphire. And Gloria Sapphire was a literary and theatrical agent. She represented a lot of people like, I think she worked with Kay Ballard and Louise Fitzhugh. She knew Jane Wagner. She knew Hansberry. And one thing, if you're trying to document a gay theatrical circle, often there's somebody at the

10:26hub of this circle who has a professional incentive to network as much as possible, like an agent. And so sometimes these worlds where people meet like Wagner and Hansberry, it's a really fun way to have a time machine back into that moment. But if you locate the person who was at the center of one of these circles. And finally, the Wagner affair hurt Dorothy Sekiel a great deal. Dorothy was very in love with Hansberry. The Wagner relationship was painful to her and occasioned a split for at least a year

10:58that was consequential, I think, for just for Hansberry's sense of stability. There were a few other gay details I'll just throw in because they relate to her work. One is that there was another Black woman in this lesbian circle that Wagner and Hansberry were in that she was a white presenting Black woman in the sense that everyone assumed that she was white, but she would correct this misimpression. So she was not white passing, she was presenting. And she was a, that's the scenario

11:29with Alton, Alton in the sign in Sidney Brustein's window. So that could have suggested it. She was a sculptor who later became a playwright. Hansberry also knew Lou Burke. And Lou Burke was a very famous copy editor at the New Yorker, who in those kinds of New Yorker circles was famous as a stalwart, very elegant, very serious person about prose. And Hansberry was always looking for people like that. And finally, very, unfortunately it was in 1964, it was pretty late in her life. She was just

12:01very happy to have found another person who could kind of contribute, you know, to that dimension of her work. And finally, there was a woman named Gloria Merolt, who she dated in the year after Wagner in 1963, who also dated a woman named France Burke in their shared circle, who was Kenneth Burke's daughter, the daughter of Kenneth Burke, the literary critic. And I think that that paints a bit of a picture. Gloria Merolt apparently was gorgeous, very mysterious, and very good at getting loans

12:31out of these often affluent women that then she often did not pay back. So she was a woman who kind of worked this world in a pretty intentional way. The trickiest part of the whole world that I was trying to report on is that there was a lot of hearsay that circulated, that you, as a reporter, you don't know quite how much, how seriously to take it. And a lot of information would be circulated, you know, how did Hansberry feel about the sign in Sidney Brustein's window? Did she consider it

13:02finished? Did she like the ending or not? But since it was circulated within a group, you have to really bracket it as hearsay. But it can be a great prompt for research. So there's all this, you know, sort of personal background to Hansberry's life at this moment that we're talking about. But what about the play itself? For those listeners who might be unfamiliar

Plot of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

13:24with the sign in Sidney Brustein's window, what's it about? So the protagonist of the play is Sidney Brustein. Brustein is a disillusioned, white Greenwich Village intellectual. He's a serial entrepreneur in that he has started a folk club, abandoned it for an alternative newspaper. In the course of the play, he gets involved with a political campaign. He's always got a lot of irons in the fire, but he doesn't necessarily have a great history of following through on a lot of his commitments. His style of speaking, there's a

13:57torrent of language. And the torrent of language, he's arguing with people, he's debating points. You can tell that there's a level where he can be trying to drown out emotion, drown out feeling and thought with this facade of intellectuality, almost compulsive argumentative nature. His narrative arc, the first act really establishes his world. He gains new hope through this possible Wally campaign. There's also a couple other sort of hopeful incidents, romances in the play. But then his hope

14:29is defeated in the most gruesome imaginable way. And then there's a tragic third act that ends in conflict and death and a promise to fight. His wife is Iris. Iris is an actress, an aspiring actress, and she works as a waitress. Like a lot of couples in this kind of bohemia, their happy marriage, their home with her cooking and his talking, it attracts a bunch of other single people who come over for dinner and accompany a lot. So they are sort of, if these are the parents, they've got all

15:04these kids that come in and out of the environment. And one of them is Alton. Alton is a writer who writes for this alternative newspaper, Sydney's paper. He works in a bookstore. He's a former communist, now just kind of unaffiliated leftist. He's white presenting, but he's Black. He's an activist and a writer who loves Sydney's sister-in-law, whose name is Gloria. Gloria is a call girl, but everyone keeps this a secret from Alton. And that becomes a really important plot point. Alton persuades Sydney

15:37to endorse their progressive friend, Wally, who's running for local office. The sign in the window is the sign that Sydney puts opposing bossism, supporting Wally in the window. And the choice to engage politically starts a chain of events that ends very, very badly in the play. Wally, it turns out, has been, is really bought and paid for by this political machine that is sort of a hybrid of democratic party politics with organized crime, which was the case with democratic party politics

16:10in the village at that time. They, they were inextricable with Frank Costello and other members of organized crime and, and narcotics were not prosecuted in any meaningful way at that time. So Sydney learns that Wally is owned by this machine and that he's been a credulous fool to believe in Wally. Alton confronts him about this lie of omission about Gloria and Sydney has to realize that he really betrayed a friend by not disclosing this information. Iris loses respect

16:43for Sydney, largely because of the Wally believing this foolishly believing in someone. And she gets involved with another guy who can help her professionally. So he's really devastated by this. There, there's a great scene where Sydney comes to realize he had underestimated his sister-in-law Mavis, or he had just really caricatured her as, as one dimensional. And he loses a lot of these people from his life. He loses Iris. He loses Alton. Wally is, is not who he thought he was. And then after he

17:18tells Gloria that Alton, you know, knows about her and has decided not to, to marry her after all, Gloria commits suicide. And then when he tries to confront Wally, like you've betrayed me, you've betrayed our, our friendship, you've betrayed the movement. Wally says, you know, if you really come out with this in your newspaper, you're going to lose your job as well. You're going to lose this newspaper that is your identity and is your income. So then the ending is Sydney pledges to fight Wally. I think there might be some ambiguity on whether he's going to follow through,

17:53but that's the plot. And then in terms of the quality of the play, people argue it's uneven, but that it has great parts and anything with Mavis in it, everyone agrees is, is really great. And a lot of that has to do that Mavis is probably built on Mamie, who was Hansberry's sister in real life. And the, the sort of square sibling coming to visit her hip friends is, is just always good comic material. The mood of the play of the sign in Sydney Brustein's window, the mood is very different

18:23than a raisin in the sun. It's, it's a play about the death of idealism and a very low point for idealism between the secret speech of 1956 and then 1965, when the new left came back again, there was this sort of malaise and all of the people who'd been on the left on some level give up for maybe a period of 10 years, or at least are, are much more at a loss as to where to go. And you see that in the play. So act one has this circular firing squad where all the different

18:56members of this community are insulting each other, but, but with rapier wit in zingers that would not be out of place in a drawing room comedy. It's a lot of the critics would single out act one as a especially successful. It's full of Ibsen references, some of which are very obvious, like Iris's dance, and some of which are much more subtle, like the wild duck references. Then you're really getting into the character of Sydney as much as possible. You see a kind of moral belligerence where he uses his, his knowledge, his morals, his ideals as weapons against the

19:29other people around him. And you can tell he's also trying to handle that cognitive dissonance of being the, the deluded liberal whose reality doesn't resemble his, these ideals. The ending is, is a really complicated question. And it aligns with this larger question of whether the play was finished. Different people interpret it differently. So my friend, Michael Anderson experiences the play as a tragedy where there's this final scene of enlightenment and that Sydney comes to see what a,

20:00sort of essentially what a dilettante is and how profoundly he doesn't align with who he thinks he is. And that that's a moment of, of sort of cold sweat clarity. Other people argue it's an open text where the audience is meant to go home and debate what happened next. And it's not necessarily meant to be clear where these characters go, but either way, it doesn't really work dramatically whichever direction she was trying to go. You know, in terms of sort of inspirations sources

Inspirations for The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

20:31for this play, you mentioned Ibsen. And I just think that's so interesting because you think of Hansberry's contemporary Arthur Miller. And of course, Ibsen always comes up in discussions of Miller. You don't usually hear, you know, inspirations like Miller, it may be, or like Ibsen, maybe it sounds like there's a bit of an element of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, but it's really interesting to hear this because you don't normally hear those names in connection with Hansberry's. I'm wondering what, what maybe in researching this, did you sort of understand about

21:02where she's drawing inspiration? So for the Iceman Cometh, her exposure to both this lesbian group and all of her former CP Labor Youth League friends who had really didn't quite know where to go after the, you know, after the secret speech, it inspired her in her thoughts. And these were just organic connections where she's like, it's a death house. This is a death house I'm in. Part of her was like, I need to get out of this world. It's, it's gonna, it's gonna ruin me. Or, you know, she

21:37was used to the black left. She'd been spent, she'd spent a long time with Louis and Dorothy Burnham, with the people around freedom. There was a real, as she always called it, triumphant mood and sense of insurgency. But she married into the, what I would say, the white left. And then she, you know, had a relationship with people that took her into this lesbian group. And, and her mind worked so theatrically that she would think in terms of analogies. And so she, she was thinking about Eugene O'Neill initially, and the Iceman Cometh specifically, the sense of lapsed anarchists, like in the Iceman Cometh,

22:13there's these overlapping narratives, and you've got these drunk people that are just talking their pipe dreams and fantasies. And she felt that in these worlds that she was in between 56, I would say between 53 and when she wrote the play. But then for the Ipsen, I don't have any documentation of where this was coming from, except that the references to Nora's dancing is so obvious that I feel that that kind of goes without saying there are two dance sequences in Sign that really

22:45directly quote Nora in different drafts of the play. She, she, at one point, she has Iris say, I'm like an inverse Nora. I'm going back into sort of male ownership or whatever. There's a reference to Dr. Stockman in a draft where somebody accuses Sidney, you're like the new Dr. Stockman, you know, you just want to expose truth in a newspaper. So that's similar, you know, to the enemy of the people. And then the references to the wild duck are much more literary. So there's a sequence where

23:17at the very end, the couple, the reconciliation of the couple, and they say, where they say, this is going to make us stronger. This is going to, we're going to find some strength through this. That's a very close to the ending of the wild duck. And there's also a scene where Sidney confronts Alton and Alton's like, I can't marry Gloria. There's absolutely no way. She's, she's a sex worker. She's a prostitute. She's been passed around. I'm not going to marry her. And there's the language of how Sidney confronts him at that moment is, is very close to how Gregor's confronts a character

23:48in the wild duck where Gregor says, I I'm giving you an opportunity. I was hoping and praying that you would be the biggest imaginable version of yourself, the most generous and caring version of yourself. And with this person who had harmed you, who had maybe in the wild duck, this is a woman who had slept with somebody else and had a kid. And then her husband raised the kid as if the daughter was her own, but he might not have been. It's a sort of a, almost like a Christian idealism where it's like rise to the occasion and forgive this thing that you are struggling to

24:24forgive and, and adhere to our ideals. But in, in the sign in Sidney Brustein's window, it's a communist ideal that they're falling short of, not a Christian one, right? It's, you know, aren't, you're a communist. Don't you understand women's lives and how fewer options they have? Can't you forgive her? And Alton says no, but it's, it's a scenario directly from the wild duck. So that's the play itself and some of its inspiration. I understand that it also, in terms of actually

Getting the Play to Opening Night

24:53getting this thing on stage to its premiere, could you tell us a little bit about how they tried to get the sign in Sidney Brustein's window to its opening night and what they had to go through? Yes, it was, it's an incredible story. So their initial producer director was Hal Prince, who was already a big deal, not as he was, it was pre-Sondheim, well pre-Sondheim, but, but he was very, very successful. He had an incredible list of investors and a Rolodex of theatrical talent that it's hard to match. He was talking to Rod Steiger. I don't think he got a

25:25commitment from Rod Steiger to be Sidney, but he was chewing it over and eventually declined saying that he didn't believe in the play, didn't think it was finished, but also didn't think she knew exactly narrowly what she wanted to say. That delayed things, I would say that that created a delay while Rod Steiger chewed it over. Prince also asked Hansberry to make significant cuts in revisions. She, this would have been in 63. She did not make these revisions. She, again,

25:55likely the, the cancer, the cancer probably created a lot of cognitive decline and it didn't help that she didn't know she had cancer because then she's just blaming herself. But she did attend, for example, one, you know, she went to an event at the actor's studio during this time period when Prince had asked her to focus exclusively on the writing. The word got back to Hal Prince that she was seen at the actor's studio and Hal Prince broke off the relationship. He said, you're not being serious. You're off running around when I need you to have your head down. And that broke that

26:28relationship. She was pretty devastated, but also felt that, you know, she was being pushed to do this faster. And, you know, now we know for very good reasons and Amaroff had great reasons to be accelerating this, but she didn't know those, what those reasons were. But anyway, time was of the essence. So he engaged, Nemaroff engaged Carmen Capalbo pretty quickly. Capalbo also asked for revisions in the, Anderson interviewed Capalbo and Capalbo told Anderson that Hansberry was very receptive to the request for edits, very receptive, said, thank God someone really read the play

27:02because she was having problems with it. So she needed and wanted an interlocutor. She was not like, this was not viewed as some kind of illegitimate request. But while she either did or didn't, you know, revise, he engaged Mort Saul and Mort Saul was maybe the worst part of all of this. So Mort Saul was so close to what Sidney was and Saul himself recognized the commonality with Sidney. He was like, yeah, this guy is me with perhaps a little bit less of a need to joke all the time, or, you know,

27:34he doesn't need to take things in the direction I do, but I get who this guy is. I know him. However, Mort Saul was not an actor. So he was unaccustomed to the tradecraft, to the work of the job. He couldn't memorize lines. He'd only ever improvised or written his own lines. He couldn't memorize somebody else's lines. Working in an ensemble was totally foreign to him. He wasn't participating in the team building dynamics that the rest of the cast was doing. And that seems to be really essential to a production working. He was not used to taking direction. So there was a tremendous amount of

28:09conflict with Capalbo. Mort Saul, a standup comedian, is not used to anything but maybe the audience's prompts. So when Capalbo would give him instructions, he just would sort of be like, why are you, who do you think you are? And it descended to a point where there was so much conflict that they had such a fight one day that Capalbo at one point offered his hand for a handshake to Saul and Saul would not shake his hand. And then Mort Saul, he eventually made an ultimatum. It's him or me. It's Capalbo or me. And no one really knew how to handle this situation.

28:44Meanwhile, Hansberry is not making the cuts, not making the revisions in and out of the hospital throughout the summer of 1964, seriously hospitalized. After opening night, she would go into a coma immediately, like two days after opening night. So unfortunately, you know, between those two things, it was really hard to get this plane off the ground. And Mort Saul eventually was in such stress that he ran away to LA. He ran away to, I'm sorry, to California, I'm pretty sure to LA to see his own therapist because he was, he just overwhelmed with the stress. And he went kind of

29:19incommunicado and he didn't give a clear answer of whether he was leaving the production or not. So they finally fired him. Capalbo quit in, in dismay. They hired Peter Cass as a new director who had a Clifford Odette's background. And then they hired a new lead, Gabriel Dell, eight days before opening night. So Gabriel Dell remained on book on opening night. The speeches, the long speeches had to be, you know, be printed out and taped onto the various pieces of furniture on the stage so that

29:50Gabriel Dell could stand strategically in a place where he could read the speech. So it was a pretty rough, rough experience for everyone involved. How was the show received when it finally premiered?

Reception of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

30:04So I would say that everyone was trying to be as respectful as possible. And the, her illness was basically common knowledge, right? Whether or not it was terminal, maybe not, but, but how serious it was, but the reviews were still largely negative. They were, it was not like this is a terrible play, but it was, we can feel where she's trying to go with this. We appreciate certain parts of it, but it just doesn't work. And after opening night and after the reviews,

30:36Nemeroff cut another 10 minutes and reworked act one, likely in collaboration with Hansberry, but Hansberry, you could tell that she was not up to her former self. If you look at the handwriting on the scripts that, you know, after opening night, her handwriting has degraded. It's not of the quality of her earlier handwriting. There's, this is a person who's in and out of hospitals and comas. They're not going to be at the top of their game professionally. But after some of these edits were made Norman Nadel from the New York world telegram and son, he, he wrote a second review, a revised

31:11review, November 3rd, 1964. He said that that first act was much improved, but that the third act he said was still just a Wagnerian immolation that was out of key with the rest of the play. Max Lerner from the New York post wrote that she has aimed at depths beyond her reach. So both Capalbo and all the critics, they saw Sidney and they, they recognized Sidney as a sort of literary descendant of other kinds of characters, anxious, ineffectual literary figures. Some of them are almost more

31:43from literary fiction, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Someone lost in a maze of self-deception and, and lost in his own contradiction, but they, you know, she just didn't get to finish it. And I think they, they saw it as related to her illness so that everyone tried to acknowledge what was good about it without, while still acknowledging it didn't work. And then conversely, a group of artists and activists donated money to keep the play going until she died. And that was this, this great activist campaign that often the marketing team for the Broadway production, the recent Broadway sign

32:17drew on that a lot in, in, in the recent production. Sorry, could you elaborate? How did they draw on it? Exactly. That's interesting. Well, when you went to the Broadway production, there's like a QR code that's, uh, when you scan the QR code, it went to a history of the play that largely emphasized this celebrity campaign to keep the play going that Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft had been very instrumental in. They reproduced the ad in the New York Times that had been, uh, that Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft had placed, uh, along as,

32:49as well as other celebrities to keep the play going. I think Oscar Isaac would emphasize, you know, there's something rebellious about supporting this play. The idea that you're going against the grain to support this sort of subversive political work that people can't handle. And they made little buttons for people to wear with Lauren's picture on it to, they just invoked a lot of a sense of like a grassroots group of people came together to try to preserve this out of love. And you 2023 audience can somehow vicariously participate in that.

33:21That's really cool. You know, you're, you're talking about the play and, and where it came from in Hansberry's life and all this, but you're also referencing, you know, looking over notes, revisions, um, documentary evidence. I wonder if you could maybe share with us a little bit, uh, what that process was like, uh, for instance, I understand your research brought you to this little known preface by Hansberry that, that was never published. It sounds like this process, this research that you were doing gave you all these new insights into the play and its background. Yeah. I loved this preface that there was a folder at the Schaumburg for just sort of

33:55leftover random pieces of paper from her Sydney period, the, the Bruce Dean period. And she had published a public preface in the New York times where she really had her public intellectual hat on. She was saying in the time of the Bay of Pigs and the obsession with French intellectual theory and, or Jack Kerouac, I am here to articulate this other position. She was really trying to engage the publicly and politically with all the great minds and the quote unquote great intellectuals of her time.

34:30But this personal preface, it's the sentimental side of Hansberry. It's the personal side of Hansberry that made her an artist and not just an intellectual, not that there's anything diminutive about being an intellectual. She loved folk music and found great emotional richness in all of these old songs. This, this was back in the early fifties. So well before it became sort of Bob Dylan, Columbia records mass, it was a really rarefied phenomenon. I would say that was still, you know, Pete Seeger and Camp Unity and small folk addict networks. She used the word addict about

35:07her relationship to this music. She optioned, or she got permission to use three Joan Baez songs in the play. And in this preface, she talked about her love of folk music and stick going from club to club until so late at night that they were always kicked out. And then they would, she and her friends would, would continue to just sing folk songs by themselves. So that creates, I think, a different understanding than maybe most people have of Hansberry. She also participated in this, you know, this Pete Seeger intellectual folk tradition where folk is a community building mechanism. It's not just

35:41art for art's sake. It builds community. It builds political will. It builds a sense of fellow feeling. And, and I think she really loved and appreciated that world. The other thing that I loved about the preface that again is, is really personal is that she writes a story that may or may not have happened about being in a club with, with, I believe Nina Simone, and that a woman came over to talk to them who was a kept woman. And she was with her much older boyfriend at a separate table, but the woman came over to talk to Hansberry. Hansberry describes the woman as looking into her eyes,

36:18seeking pity and indictment and not finding them. And Hansberry said her own mind immediately connected this woman. She just immediately had an association with an old song from the French resistance in World War II, where it was a song about an underground resistance activist who no one knew their real name. No one knew where they were going. No one knew where they lived because they were resistance activists living underground anonymously. And she connected the extreme loneliness of this kept woman to that person's life in a way that I think connects very directly, obviously,

36:53to the play and just shows the level of, of empathy and tenderness in her heart. As you've mentioned, this play closes within days of Hansberry's death. So we're already sort of

Robert Nemiroff and Hansberry's Legacy

37:08thinking about her legacy and her unfortunate, you know, death around the time that the show ends. And we've mentioned the figure of Robert Nemiroff, but he seems especially important in this context. Can you tell us a little bit more about Nemiroff and how he figures both into the story of this particular play and the way that Hansberry's reputation gets shaped in the years after she passes? Yes. So Robert Nemiroff was, he was a red diaper baby and that is central to his political

37:41education. He grew up with two restauranteur parents who were very devoted communists. He was raised within the labor youth league. The labor youth league was the communist party youth group that was largely devoted to leadership development. So the idea is that young people needed to learn skills like how to organize a protest, how to organize a newspaper, how to organize any other kind of educational event. They were also receiving a tremendous amount of left political education. So Bobby and his

38:12brother Leo were both raised in this, in this organization. Other people in that group included Douglas Turner Ward, Harold Cruz, Audrey Lord, Clarence Jones, and then an adjacent person was Claudia Jones, the great leftist from Trinidad who eventually got deported for her communist party affiliation and had to go to England. But Claudia Jones was significantly older. She was maybe 15 years older than the rest of these people. But a lot of black leaders got raised up through this group, even though they were also very critical of it. And Hansberry

38:47came in through Nemiroff to this group. Nemiroff was a, went to NYU and then was a literature grad student there. He took on various freelance jobs. He worked as a book publicist at Avon. He handled a lot of music sort of A&R deals. Come around 1952, Hansberry was under significant family pressure to return to Chicago. This was largely because of her communist party involvement, which had been, I would say, more centrally through a black left, what some people call the Harlem left network, not really Labor Youth

39:24League, more the different kind. Some of these people were in the Labor Youth League, but freedom was much more central to her, at least for the first few years. But she, her family was like, you're going to get arrested. And I'm sorry, you're causing us tremendous stress. It's very, very unnerving to us that you might end up like Claudia Jones, you know, you might be arrested. There's, we don't really take any of this seriously. But even though we think you're following a fantasy, this could be really consequential for you. So marrying was a solution for her to stay in New York City. And there were

39:58a couple of men who wanted to marry her. It didn't always work out. And there's, there was a one, this Roosevelt Jackson who might've been, he may have existed, or he may have been a pseudonym. Then there's a writer for Freedom newspaper who, but he lived in the South and she was not going to move to the South. And then there was Nemiroff and Nemiroff was wildly in love with her. She really liked him. She felt that he was, again, this kind of stabilizing force that I think she knew would help her write. And the letter where she accepts his marriage proposal, it's really like a commitment

40:30to writing and a commitment to being an artist. And that this kind of helpful, supportive person was, was going to make that happen and help her make that happen. He provided financial and emotional support that was central to A Raisin in the Sun getting written. A Raisin in the Sun would never have happened without him. He had adapted a song, an old Stevedore song as a pop hit. So a sort of what you would call under the folk umbrella song, but as a pop hit, he made enough money that she was able to stop her part-time jobs and write full-time. And then he, you know, even as he was providing the

41:06money, he also provided the emotional support for her to write. And then after A Raisin, after A Raisin in the Sun succeeded so intensely, the love affair fluctuated, but the professional relationship really did not fluctuate. He was trying to build himself up as a producer. He was trying to produce a musical called Kicks and Company written by Oscar Brown in Chicago. When it didn't work out with the director, he had Lorraine go and direct in Chicago. That didn't work out, but you can see sort of, you know, they were so intertwined that they would call on each other in a

41:39crisis. So then when Hal Prince bailed, Nemiroff became the producer of Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. He led the campaign to save Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. He really was her savior. So there was no real extricating herself, but they did divorce in 1964. I think that there's debate about around why, but it's, I think that ultimately the, the friendship between them and the professional need that she had of someone she could trust when she was in a world of sharks, that just trumped

42:14everything else. In her will, her will was written in 1964. She named Nemiroff as her literary executor, but he was not a beneficiary in the will. The, the will was very unusual because normally you give a percentage of the income to different beneficiaries, because obviously the income varies from year to year. So it makes more of sense generally to, to give a percentage, but she gave a flat amount of money, 8,000 a year to Mamie, her sister. I mean, Nanny, the mother, if the mother were alive, but then it was to Mamie, the, the, the sister later on, she gave a thousand a year to Dorothy C. Kules and the rest

42:46was supposed to go to the movement. And that didn't ultimately happen for a number of reasons. One is that after she died in 1965, first WBAI produced a radio show of all of her words, read by famous actors. Then Nemiroff took that same idea and created both a play to be called, that was called To Be Young, Gifted in Black, and a book to be called Young, To Be Young, Gifted in Black. But these were separate texts. These were different from each other. And because he was the adapter slash producer

43:20of the play version, somebody tipped the attorney general of the state of New York and was like, this guy's just enriching himself off of this estate. And he was not a beneficiary, but he's making money by hiring himself and choosing how much he pays himself. So no one knows who it is who alerted Louis Lefkowitz, the attorney general about this, but, but there was a legal filing in 1970 by the attorney general. So he stepped down as executor. Nemiroff stepped down as executor.

43:51He could have allowed Sean L. Perry, her cousin, who she had named as an executor, that could have become the new executor. But instead he had Clarence Jones become the executor. Clarence Jones had been in the Labor Youth League with them, was, had been Martin Luther King's lawyer. That's what he's most known for. But then went and worked and actually in finance and ultimately became on the business side of entertainment, particularly black entertainment. I believe he ran radio stations like WBLS in New York City and another station. So he became the surrogate in 1970 and he was a much more

44:26business minded person than Sean L. So in the wake of this switch of executors, Nemiroff bought all the intellectual property from the estate for $40,000, which would equate to about 300,000 in today's money. This allowed him to pay Mamie out. So Mamie needed money. The sister needed money and the $40,000 purchase, the intellectual property went from being something that had an unknown value. The value might fluctuate from year to year. How do you, how do you kind of close out an estate like that? Buying that

44:58money, buying the intellectual property is one way to close out that estate and get Mamie the money in a faster way, which she needed. It also allowed him to just kind of go very, very hard on producing all this stuff because he then, you know, had a financial incentive and he was going to benefit from any kind of Broadway productions. So he really went into this period of overdrive in terms of producing her work. He produced Les Blanc with James Earl Jones in 1970. He produced another version of

45:28The Sign in Sidney Brustine's Window with Hal Linden in 1972. He wrote, he oversaw the musical of The Raisin in the Sun called Raisin in 1973 that won a Tony for Best Musical. And then he was just a really consistent and determined person to get her work produced. It didn't always work, but he was always trying. And then finally in the 80s, he worked with Roundabout to make a version of the play that

45:59eventually got on PBS. And I would say between the PBS TV version of the play and the movie of the play, that really locked in her legacy, that really locked in A Raisin in the Sun as a classic in a way that almost only a movie can do. And so all of this is fantastic, right? And, you know, you just have to ask some questions about the money. You can't be responsible if you don't. But while recognizing he did make a great contribution, the one caveat is that his sensibility was a little more commercial than hers.

46:32And while having your income depend on getting her work produced, it lit a fire under him and he made more effort. It also creates a temptation maybe to do more commercial versions of her work. And it's a catch-22. I don't know, because sometimes you feel like he really did make a version of Hansberry for each decade that suited the sensibility of the decade. And then in other ways, you could argue that some of these productions compromised her work.

47:03Yeah. And speaking of sort of a new Hansberry for each decade, what's happened with the sign in Sidney Brustein's window? This work that, as we've been discussing, you know, really sort of seemed like it was considered at the time as a sort of a missed opportunity. You know, what a shame that Hansberry was ill, wasn't able to maybe turn it into the play that it could have been. But as you write in this article, over the last decade or so, there have been some pretty high-profile productions, culminating perhaps in the one that we've been talking about with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. What's going on here? Why do you think theaters are

47:35rediscovering this work at this particular time?

Rediscovering The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

47:39Hansberry, I'll give a quick kind of recent history of these productions. There was a production in 2014 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Annie Kaufman was originally supposed to direct that with Louis Douthat as the dramaturg. Then in 2016, Annie Kaufman did it at Goodman Theatre in Chicago. It was supposed to be in New York before now, but the pandemic intervened. Why now? I mean, there's a crisis, a financial crisis in non-profit theater that's related to audiences aging out or

48:12dying off. And a lot of these non-profit theaters are reducing the amount of production, the number of productions they do, or just closing altogether. This has created an opening for people, for theaters to make more experiments and attempts to bring new audiences in, younger, more diverse audiences. Then I would say after 2020, after the George Floyd protests and We See You, White American Theater, that also creates an incentive for theaters to stage works by Black playwrights. I've noticed a difference

48:45between how this play was staged and then, let's say, the Alice Childress revivals. The commonality is that with the Alice Childress and with this, there's a time machine quality that's very alluring and enticing to audiences where some of these plays, you really are brought back into worlds that it's very, you don't see represented. It's hard to go back and meet those people. But with Sidney having a largely white cast, it does sort of, you do think, oh, you can get a, you know, you can get an Oscar

49:19Isaac in here. You can take this in a direction where it's presented a little bit more as like a story of a marriage in a way that will appeal to a broader type of audience. And that, again, is that catch-22 in danger of you want people to see it, and you want people to feel a connection to it. And then you always have to double and triple check with yourself whether you're not centering the essential character of Sidney and his feelings and his emotional dislocation and

49:55his emotional arc in how you market it, how you understand it. What about more broadly? I mean, you're talking about how Nemiroff's efforts kind of helped to cement A Raisin in the Sun, maybe posthumously, as this sort of great American play. But why do you think it's so important to understand Hansberry beyond just the context of her single most famous play? What do we get out of putting her career in that bigger, broader context? When you have more than just A Raisin in the Sun, when you juxtapose all three of the plays that I

50:28consider mostly finished, A Raisin in the Sun, Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, and Les Blanc, you see patterns, you see similarities among them, and you also see differences. And one of the similarities is that they're all family dramas. And they're all especially fixated on this question of a paternal legacy and how it influences the next generation. In Raisin, on the one hand, I would argue that Raisin is ultimately a functional family. There's all this strife, but by the end of the play, this moral inheritance does successfully get passed from like grandfather to

51:04father to son. And you have Travis, you have a son who is a figure of hope and a figure of the future. The universe of sign is still family fixated, but much bleaker. The family is shredded. The marriage breaks up or the Alton-Gloria relationship never ends in marriage. The father of the three girls, the three women, Iris, Mavis, and Gloria, the father must have been such a remote figure that none of the three of them really knew him. And they all have their own unique idea of him,

51:37which is a sign of his, of an ambiguous or confusing legacy. Whereas in Raisin, the legacy is crystal clear. You don't unfortunately learn anything about Sidney's family, which probably would have helped a lot. And then in Les Blanc, it's again, a family conflict. The family is a little, it's, there's a fratricidal ending, but there's also this sort of a white dimension of the family where the protagonist has a white woman who played a sort of quasi maternal role to him, but has to die

52:08according to the plot of the play. So I would say that there's a sense that people you love and people who played a familial role for you may have to die if necessary political events occur, but there's still this family drama among all three of them, except that then there's also all of these, these differences. And I would say that all three of these plays represent different parts of Hansberry's psyche, different moods, different modes psychically. She, she had insurgent, optimistic,

52:39triumphant moments. She had despairing moments. She had moments of, of shame and guilt. And so I feel that you, you really get to know her better by seeing all three of these plays. And from my kind of sentimental perspective, I feel like I know her better as a person, but I think academics will know her work better having all three plays in mind. And the last thing I would hope to come from a broader sense of her work is that particularly sign, I think would be an amazing pedagogical tool because it's unfinished and unfinished plays can sometimes be more fun because of the endless

53:15speculation they induce about what would she have done next? Or how, how did these characters act after the play ends? Hmm. What do you think about this plot line? I feel that if you're learning literature or if you're learning how to be a playwright or a dramaturg, this, this just could be a tremendously useful pedagogical device. And I hope that people look at it more because it can really kind of create a spark creatively for people. We'll post links in our show notes that will let you read Elise's article in American theater,

53:50as well as learn more about the sign in Sidney Brustein's window. Elise, thank you so much for telling us more about this underappreciated chapter in Lorraine Hansberry's career. Thank you for having me. We'll post links in our show notes that will let you read Elise's article in American theater, as well as learn more about the sign in Sidney Brustein's window. Elise, thank you so much for telling us more about this underappreciated chapter in Lorraine Hansberry's career. Thank you for having me.

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