His latest project, after the collapse of Walden Pond, is a local newspaper, a Voice stand-in called the Village Crier. Maisel but with a much greater range on display). He plays the banjo, dreams of a cabin in the woods, and fetishizes the country aspects of his goyish Oklahoma-born struggling actress wife, Iris (Rachel Brosnahan, within the realm of Mrs. As played by Oscar Isaac, the current crown prince of woolen heartthrobs, Sidney is full of rambunctious romantic enthusiasm but little follow-through. “Your trouble,” his friend Alton (Julian De Niro) teases him, “is that you admire the wrong parts of Thoreau,” which is to say he likes the aesthetics but ignores the political commitments. The sign in question goes up outside the window of a Greenwich Village apartment owned by Sidney Brustein, a listless Jewish countercultural intellectual who has just tried and failed to open a bar named Walden Pond.

Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, first performed on Broadway in 1964, has come back to BAM in 2023 to reveal itself as the great forgotten play about the dynamics of posting. Of course there’s nothing new about the problem of intention and action. There’s always the possibility that what seems like compassion is only a performance of it, that a slogan has no commitment behind it. What’s the difference between caring and only pretending to care? That might feel like a newfangled concern in the era of internet activism, when privileged people rush to deploy hashtags of the moment or black squares and then later complain about “ally fatigue” or accuse one another of virtue signaling.

Hansberry lorraine a raisin in the sun