Video: Oscar Isaac, Rachel Brosnahan & Company Celebrate Opening Night of THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN'S WINDOW

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World

Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan have returned to the stage in Lorraine Hansberry's

The Sign in Sydney Brewsteen's Window, directed by Annie Kaufman. And we're here at Bam's Harvey Theater to celebrate with the company on opening night

I saw the show on Sunday, Sunday. Okay. It's one of my favorite plays anyway. Really? Yeah. Tell me why when you first fell in love with it, what made you say, yes, I have to do this? Um, you know, it's, it is like falling in love. You know, it's hard to say why. Um, I can point to certain things. There's, you know, certain elements that I guess there was like a mirror to things that are happening now. There's obviously, um, the feeling of being fed up with it all, being fed up with the exhortations, uh, with trying to do the right

thing, not knowing what the right thing is, saying the wrong thing, you know, all that and that

kind of feeling of being, of giving up a little bit, saying like, I've done what I can, you know

I just want to just go up to the woods and be by myself. And so there's something about that

that I connected with and this reckoning that happens because of that. But I think there was just

this emotional punch that would hit me every time I read it. There was even a moment there where

I was like, you know what, maybe, maybe I don't want to put myself through going on stage every night

blah, blah. Let me just read it again. I read it. And within a couple of pages, I just said, I have to do this

There was just something about Sydney and the way he speaks and the way he feels that I just found too compelling to pass up

I had never heard of this play which feels embarrassing before I was asked to do a reading in 2019 with Oscar and Annie and a group of amazing actors And I read it and thought it was extraordinary

And then we had the opportunity to read it out loud. And it just leapt off the page in ways that I couldn't have imagined and was funny in ways

that I couldn't have imagined. And Lorraine's voice comes through all of these characters so clearly in very different ways

I just, I, I, I, I, we did another reading in 2021 and had the opportunity to come on board and

jumped at the chance. It's opening night. How do you feel? I mean, I, I, I just, I can't believe it

I mean, it's, I just, I'm really pinching myself. It's, it's, it's fantastic

I'm very excited. I'm very excited for the, for my friends and my family to check it out

And, um, and for hopefully for this play to just live on in, you know, in the canon right next to a

raise it in the sun. Talk about this glorious production that Annie has directed and has this incredible cast

Amazing cast. Amazing cast. I think the perfect cast really for the play

Because it's really an ensemble piece and the incredible cast sort of colors in

Each of the wonderful characters Lorraine has created. Lorraine is known for painting amazing characters, as we know from a Raisin in the Sun

And this is that on steroids. It's just this incredible ensemble. And each person's sort of a different color of the spectrum

So we're really, really lucky to have not only Oscar and Rachel

at the helm but all the way through to our youngest Gus Beirney and Julian De Niro It amazing I play Iris Brewsteen who is married to Sydney Brewsteen

and I love that she's kind of an inside-out person. Her heart is on the outside of her body

It runs down her sleeves and down her chest and out her tips of her toes

And she's so deeply vulnerable and open and earnest in a way that

that I struggle with and find really admirable. So I just, I love her

He's such a complex character, isn't he? Yeah, he's so complex. And that she's investigating aspects of herself in this man

was also very exciting. You know, it's not often that you get, you know

you get to do plays by these amazing female playwrights, and that she wrote this very complex

Jewish intellectual, fokey guy that is going through this reckoning that has so many facets to him

That's so funny and so heartbreaking at the same time. It really was, like Annie said

Jewish Hamlet. We have a mantra at the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trusts

Lorraine is of the future. And the idea is really that we, as an audience

are catching up to her. And we may never catch up to her

because she had this incredible, because she was visionary, because she was activist, she sort of saw concretely

into the future in terms of what people could become, what we could become as communities

what we could become as citizens, what we could become as theater

And this play just rifts on that and gives us so much back So it rich Oh God I feel like the luckiest person on the planet

We've had so much fun. Oscar said last night that this play feels like trying to catch a wave

and that couldn't feel more true, that we've gotten to surf together to continue the metaphor, I guess

through these last couple months, and it changes every night. It's been a long time for both of us since we were on stage

And so it's just been the greatest. gift to get to do this together and with this incredible cast

People say, oh my God, I love Oscar or Rachel from film and TV, and I'm going to see them

in something called a play. And they come here and they introduce a live audience as we all were

And that's got to be the most amazing thing. I mean, it's extraordinary

It's extraordinary. Yeah, they're being introduced to these words and they're being introduced to this art form

And it's live. And I feel like they're really, really experiencing what kind of magic that is

Because of your notoriety on film and television, you're introducing a whole whole. whole new group of audiences to live theater

What that means to you? Oh, everything. I mean, theater is my first true love

and it feels like something that hasn't been as accessible to a lot of people in the last couple years

I'm really grateful that we've, you know, that we're on Today Ticks and people can rush this show

and it's been really cool to see students come see it and folks who are just dropping in town

and, you know, however they come in the door, it's been really special

What it means to me is pride and excitement in being able to be one of the instruments in bringing this piece back to life and to shedding light on this forgotten work, really, that hasn't been done nearly enough

And so to be able to kind of lend my voice to that is really exciting