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Alison Stewart: This is All of It, I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho, thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming or On Demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, a film that examines a childhood friendship gone awry. It's an Oscar nominee in the best foreign feature category. We'll also speak to a former Met Museum guard whose memoir, All the Beauty in the World, details how and why he became a guard after a career at the New Yorker, and now being surrounded by art changed his life.

That's the plan, so let's get this started with a new production at BAM of a 50-year-old play.

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A revival of one Lorraine Hansberry's final plays, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, is currently on stage at BAM. It is sometimes described as "the play that got away" and a largely unrecognized work from a legendary playwright. The original New York run in 1964 lasted just over 100 performances. Lorraine Hansberry died from cancer a few months later at age 34 after making history as the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway, A Raisin in the Sun. The current version of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window stars Oscar Isaac in the title role and Rachel Brosnahan as his wife, Iris.

They are a married couple with progressive ideals living in 1960s Greenwich Village. The marriage is passionate but fraught, judgments are made, lies are told, friends and family aren't who they claim to be. It examines what happens when values are challenged and when authenticity is questioned. Now, we don't want to do any spoilers, if I dip into that territory, I'll give you a big heads-up. The play is running at BAM's Harvey Theatre through March 24 and with me now is lead actor Rachel Brosnahan. Rachel, welcome back to the show.

Rachel Brosnahan: Thank you. Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello, and director Anne Kauffman, who looks to be in the lobby of the theatre maybe.

Anne Kauffman: I am. That's exactly where I am. Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hello. We're recreating the West Village, you're recreating the West Village in the 1960s, a very specific moment in New York City cultural history. Rachel, what are some things about your character Iris, and how she lives her life? Lets us know the time and place, the village in the '60s.

Rachel Brosnahan: Yes, they're a part of this Bohemian scene in the 1960s, Iris and Sidney. They have this apartment that is the center of their universe. People come in and out without knocking sometimes and no one's got keys. They are performing Bohemian as much as they're living it, I think you see that in the way that they dress and the kinds of conversations that they have. Lorraine, I think both embraces that scene, it was something that she was a part of, it's a scene that she recognized and also levels some fair criticism at it too.

Alison Stewart: Anne, what is interesting to you about this neighborhood and this time?

Anne Kauffman: Well, we did a lot of research both when I did it in 2016 at the Goodman Theatre and even more so here, it almost feels like a whole new play with this cast and with the research that we delve into this time. There's just, the neighborhood itself was run by an Italian political arm. It was largely an Italian neighborhood, the Bohemians were "invading" at that time, it was a really, really mixed and diverse place, all walks of life. Their entertainment really was getting together in Washington Square Park, and singing, and talking, and arguing.

I was thinking about that question at, what's 1964, versus my friendships now is like I feel like we're so polite with each other and these folks are just not polite in a really refreshing way. Also, the language is very different now than it was then, so yes.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, to bring our audience into the conversation, can you explain what the sign in the window is of the apartment that Iris and Sidney share?

Rachel Brosnahan: Well, the sign in the window is a sign in support of the political campaign of a friend of theirs, a gentleman named Wally O'Hara. The sign is the subject of much debate, what does it mean to endorse somebody, what does it mean to hang a sign in your window that lets everybody know how you feel about something? It feels less about the specific campaign I suppose, although it is a big part of it and more about what it means to put your name on something and to scream in support in that way.

Alison Stewart: Anne, what kind of conversations did you have with your set designing your team about how to capture the aesthetic of a 1960s Greenwich Village apartment of pseudo Bohemians?

Anne Kauffman: Well, you know what happened, we went to our costume designers apartment who lives in the village and actually lives pretty close to-- actually lives on Bleecker Street, which was one of the homes of-

Alison Stewart: Lorraine.

Anne Kauffman: -of Lorraine, yes. I loved it so much, I love the very strange way that it was cut up that you can see that these are on the one hand tenement buildings, but also even cut up further as the decades progressed. We took a lot of inspiration from her. In fact, it's her apartment on that set. I've always been really interested in-- there's a line in the play that I don't think will ruin anything where Sidney says, "The world's about to crack right open, if we don't change, we'll fall into the crack."

I really do feel like New York City is always on the verge of cracking, I think that we're always under construction, this city. I really wanted the feel of elegant construction sites, so a very precarious box that's floating in the middle of a very precarious structure.

Alison Stewart: Yes, for people who, when they go see the show, that we can see underneath the stage, we can see around the sides of the stage, we can see above the set of the apartment and it really-- It's interesting as an audience member, I'm not sure from where I'm supposed to look, but then I know where I'm supposed to look later on, trying not to give spoilers. My guest is Rachel Brosnahan and Anne Kauffman. We're talking about the revival of Lorraine Hansberry's final play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, which is running at BAM through March 24th.

Rachel, when you read the script for the first time, how would you describe what it is Iris wants from her life?

Rachel Brosnahan: That's the question [laughter] that Iris is asking herself in this very moment when we meet her. We've often talked about this play as being a play about passing in more ways than one. We meet Iris at a moment of transition where she's realizing the ways in which she isn't as happy as she thought she might be with the life that she's living. She wants to be an actress, she wants to make it, that's not really coming to fruition, she's working in a restaurant serving pancakes.

She's seeing some of the holes in her marriage, in her relationships, and some of the sheen that maybe had, I don't want to say blinded, but muted her vision, I suppose, for a while, it's starting to fade away. She's asking herself that throughout the entire play and begins to find an answer, I would say, by the end.

Alison Stewart: Anne, as you mentioned, you directed this in Chicago in 2016 but you've been thinking about this play for a long time about bringing this play back. When you first read the play, what were your initial impressions, and then as you've worked with it over this period of time, how has your impression of it evolved?

Anne Kauffman: When I first encountered it, I was 19 or something, in college, and I did one of Iris's monologue very poorly. One of the reasons I decided to get into another part of the theatre, not acting. I really felt at that time-- and that was like in the 1980s, I felt like it was like an old-fashioned play and then I came into contact with it again, probably about 10 or 11 years later when one of my students at NYU undergrad directing students wanted to do it for her thesis. I thought how crazy is that, that she's going to take this dusty play and want to do it.

As I was sitting watching because I was mentoring her on it, I was just totally struck by the relationship between Iris and Sidney and its complications that you can't really define it. That it's not clear where they are in their process of being together, and where they are in their process as individuals. I really, really, really felt a kinship with their marriage in my own marriage at the time. I think as I say I've grown up with this play, so I have changed as I get older and changed and have more experiences et cetera.

The facets of the diamond of this play, they just shine in-- different facets shine at different times. I feel we are at a moment now where it's like a perfect storm, I would say of conditions, both where we are politically and socially, culturally, and where I am as an artist as well. To take up the mantle of this piece again and to really give it a go and to really show what this piece is made of.

Alison Stewart: Have New Yorkers responded differently than when you ran it in Chicago? I'm wondering if there's any sense of recognition for people in the audience.

Anne Kauffman: It's a really good question. We're still really early in previews, but I am very much taking stock of people around me. I will say that the thing that's one of the differentiations I would say, is that Chicago, they really own Lorraine as one of their own, she's from there. There's a different pride I think about this woman who made it in New York City. I was really getting a lot of that in 2016 and it remains to be seen how audiences are responding to it today.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, this relationship between your character Iris and her husband Sidney, there's a tension that exists between them. What is the source of the tension initially?

Rachel Brosnahan: I think it's a number of things, but I think the predominant source of that tension is that they're both dreamers who for a number of reasons have lost faith in each other's ability to achieve their dreams and that's a really difficult pill to swallow. I think they've stopped believing in each other and they want to believe in each other, I think, but it's driving a wedge between them. Iris says at some point, "Our fighting is different now." They've always fought, they've always been people who argue and challenge each other and make each other crazy, but it's also hot and fun and funny.

Something is changing and not for the better when we meet them. it's something that they're trying to navigate to varying degrees of success. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: The character is 29 years old, an aspiring actor living in New York, sounds familiar. [laughs] What from your own professional journey or your memory has been helpful in understanding how Iris is feeling?

Rachel Brosnahan: Oh gosh. The crippling insecurity and imposter syndrome is totally familiar, [laughter] and it never goes away. Iris and I are so different and it's been one of the great challenges of discovering this role within this play. It's one of the things that I really admire about Iris, that I think one of the things that Lorraine admired and was also very cautious about and critical of in all important ways. This vulnerability that Iris has and for Lorraine, I think that was the vulnerability of white women in a way that Black women were not allowed to be.

Iris is an inside-out person. She wears her insides fully on the outside and it makes her squishy and soft and gorgeously expressive in a way that has been a challenge to access, but a welcome one. [laughs] Definitely, I'm very familiar with that feeling of wondering whether or not on a day-to-day basis you can get through.

Alison Stewart: Anne, Iris's family backstory is important to the play. Can you share a little bit about the dynamic between the sisters and how you thought about directing characters who are sisters?

Anne Kauffman: I come from a big family of sisters. There's five of us girls and a boy and so it's one of my favorite things about this play is the love and how different these sisters are. Also their different versions of their upbringing and their memories, they seem contradictory when in fact, I really, really think that there's a lot of truth in that. Again, the span between my sisters are 10 years older. There's 10 years between the oldest and the youngest and that's a lot of years.

When I was casting this, Mavis is someone who comes from the 2016 production and I just knew when Rachel was the person that I thought, "Oh my God, Miriam and Rachel are just going to have-- they're so different." In fact, in real life, they're like opposite in a weird way. I feel like Mavis is playing who Rachel is in terms of like her ambitions and her practicality and Rachel is playing the whimsy that is Miriam. Then we brought in Gus.

It was just like it was a no-brainer once she auditioned that I was just like, "Oh my, not only do Rachel and Gus look alike." They have this vulnerability and this sweetness to them and this strength of Mavis. I love the Venn diagram of sisters and it was really a pleasure to have the three of them get together and just talk about what their shared history is because not all of them are on stage together and that's really interesting conceit that Lorraine plays with.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. It's currently at BAM. I'm speaking with actor Rachel Brosnahan and director Anne Kauffman. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All of It.

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This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, my guest, this hour actor Rachel Brosnahan and director Anne Kauffman. We're talking about the revival, Lorraine Hansberry's play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. It's at BAM through March 24th at the Harvey Theater. Rachel, your partner in this play is Oscar Isaac. He's playing Sidney. What are the conversation you had with Oscar that really affected how you thought about presenting that relationship on stage?

Rachel Brosnahan: We both have had a lot of conversation about it and also not. I think we've both been leaning a lot into intuition and the work we've individually done on these characters because there is a lot that they keep from each other. That being said, we had a lot of really great discussions during the first readings of this play. We had this great gift of a week in December to spend together doing work around the table and we had a lot of discussions about what we think their history looks like [laughs] and what exactly it is that they're fighting about moment to moment.

Alison Stewart: Anne, what works about the chemistry between these actors, Rachel and Oscar?

Anne Kauffman: I feel like I was just thinking about the questions you just asked Rachel and I think it's true they may have not talked about the play precisely. Watching them when they're not on stage, they spend a lot of time together which is very rare when I'm working on something that doesn't involve Sidney or Iris. I really have enjoyed giving them time to play by themselves. I'm not even talking about on the play, but just that they have a really easy relationship. Both of them have a great sense of humor and they rib each other a lot.

Lots of times I'm just like letting them continue on the sidelines, doing some things before getting them back into rehearsal to get that playfulness and that relationship into the work. They respect each other and they're a ton of fun together and I think that's a huge part of what makes them work.

Alison Stewart: Sidney is not the most likable person, I'm just going to say it out loud. [laughs]

Rachel Brosnahan: Are any of them know?

Alison Stewart: Good point. He's very sure he has all the answers, he's very sure he knows how to be a bohemian, how to be progressive, and he learns his lesson later on. What challenge does that present you as a director, Anne, when you have a character who we need to follow, we need to invest in, but sometimes just, ah, that guy?

Anne Kauffman: It's all in the casting. Honestly. I've done readings of this play where the guy playing Sidney has zero sense of humor and it's deadly. You just can't do the play. I really feel like for 15 years I've been searching for my Sidney, and when I heard Oscar read it the first time because I was really ready to give up on this play. Just because Sidney is exactly what you described. He's also everything. I always talk about him being like Carrie Grant meets Zero Mostel. He has to be a leading man in a clown and super smart and super quick.

Also have a very, very profound soul and the bottomless pit of despair. That's a hard combo platter to find. When I heard Oscar read it for the first time, I am not a weepy person but I wept because I hadn't realized how at arm's length I had kept the play for the past few years because I couldn't find a Sidney. I'll tell you Oscar is so charming and so funny and so lovable and I think that the key to him is his own self-criticism and his own vulnerability. He says to iris, "I don't know why I do that. I don't why I say those things to you."

I think it's a real question he has. To really reduce it, I think he's going through a midlife crisis. Everyone in this play is going through a transition and he's having a real crisis that he doesn't even recognize. It's 1960s, he makes fun. He pokes fun therapy, but he really needs it and I think that his questioning of himself at times is the way to our hearts.

Alison Stewart: When you're thinking about Lorraine Hansberry the author of this play, it's mostly white characters obviously A Raisin in the Sun about a Black family trying to integrate a neighborhood. When it debuted, writers spent a lot of time talking about this, talking about race. As somebody who's spent a lot of time with it, Annie and maybe Rachel as you're coming to it more recently, what do you think Hansberry was trying to explore about white progressives? You want to take that first, Anne?

Anne Kauffman: Yes, I feel really emotional about it because I think she's so incredibly smart about it. She was married to a white progressive, a Jewish man which we can be easily led to believe that Sidney is Robert Nemiroff when in fact Sidney is very much Lorraine. I think that the most beautiful thing about Lorraine is that she speaks about humanity. Right now the problems are that we are separating ourselves out, but she doesn't believe in that as a notion. She has a lot of faith in human beings and the ability to better themselves.

What she's saying at the white progressive, at that moment and I think a lot of us feel that right now is the idea that white progressives do a certain amount of work and achieve a certain something and then think they're done or they get tired. We get tired. He says, "I'm tired. I have experienced the death of the exclamation point. I can no longer abide by the fight for the refreshment committee," but of course, it's not a refreshment committee. We're talking about people's lives and this is also something that he is realizing. I do think that is her--

I think her community of Black artists really experienced the knocking down and having to get up each day. I think that white progressives and this particular group I'll say because that's who she's aiming her sights on, can wake up the next morning and go like, "Ooh, that was amazing. Good job and I'm finished." I think that's what she's trying to say and the fight for a whole humanity.

Rachel Brosnahan: Then there's one lone Black character in the play.

Anne Kauffman: Who passes for white.

Rachel Brosnahan: He tries. [crosstalk] reductive so much of the initial conversation around this play as if this community wasn't also Lorraine's. She's also writing from her own experience as in some ways she did with A Raisin in the Sun. She was a part of this community and she's present as Annie said, in so many of these characters. She comes through each one of them in different ways, through the questions that they're asking, the challenges that they're facing. I'm continually inspired, as I said had this privilege of spending this week digging dramaturgically into this play in December.

One of the other things she was frustrated by was her fellow artists, giving over to despair. Edward Albee certainly was one of those artists she was very frustrated by who makes his way in here in the form of David. It becomes clear through this play and through all the criticism she's leveling and through all the questions all of these characters are asking that as Annie said, she does believe deeply in people's ability to change and invites them to feel something real. To push apathy and despair aside and feel something that moves you to action.

If we've done our jobs with this play, hopefully, audiences feel moved to some kind of action big or small but feel a pressure to not just sit idly by and talk and talk and talk and not do anything.

Alison Stewart: In the lobby of the theater there's a Lorraine Hansberry display so people can learn more about her. Tell us a little bit about the origin of that.

Anne Kauffman: One of the reasons I really wanted to do this play also at BAM was the opportunity and this play in particular to introduce people to the activist. As Rachel said I just want to say really clearly that her activism is also happening within relationships. It's an action to recognize someone who you're talking to, to listen and recognize them. That's a huge action. I just wanted people to-- because again people know her as, A Raisin in the Sun as a playwright. Playwright was a tool she used for her activism.

This play, it was very ambitious because she was writing about everything. Her activities outside of playwriting, I feel like are crucial to understanding who she was as a person and this play. It seems so silly but I wanted people to recognize her as a mover of social, cultural political moments. She's in there fighting and these plays are a tool and that's what they are.

Alison Stewart: For listeners at this show may remember that we did a week-long series on Lorraine's Hansberry I think last February so they can listen to it. Soyica Colbert, her biography of Lorraine Hansberry. We had a really long interview with her and it was pretty great.

Anne Kauffman: She's amazing. Just not to do but the origin she's part of that. She was part of that presentation. She was actually the lobby display and she was one of our first speakers and what I call the dramaturgy jump. In December she was there speaking with us. She's extraordinary.

Alison Stewart: It can't go without saying Rachel, that the character that people know you from on television, Mitch Maisel coexisting at this time with Iris in New York. Would they have ever run into each other do you think?

Rachel Brosnahan: I've been asked this question a couple times and I think the best I can say, they're so polarly different. I think Midge might be closer to someone like Mavis, the older sister. Maybe there's a world in which Iris and Sidney would be at one of those gaslight sets. Apart from that, [laughter] they are living in completely separate worlds. I learned a lot it turns out about salad making from working on the marvelous Mrs. Maisel and what a 1960s salad might look like that has made its way into this play.

Alison Stewart: Everything happens for a reason. The name of the play is The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. It is at BAM through March, 24th. We didn't spoil anything. Well done. Rachel Brosnahan and Anne Kauffman, thank you so much for being with us.

Anne Kauffman: Thanks so much.

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