A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

For New York, she has recruited a pair of leading players who have both celebrity stature and substantial theater backgrounds: film star Oscar Isaac appears as Sidney, a would-be entrepreneur whose latest doomed project is a neighborhood newspaper and Rachel Brosnahan, known to TV fans as “The Marvelous Mrs. Kauffman’s first tango with “Sign” a staging she helmed for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2016 was received enthusiastically.

There were revivals, with tweaks guided for a while by her ex-husband and literary executor, producer Robert Nemiroff, but none on Broadway - until last week, that is, when veteran director Anne Kauffman’s new production arrived at the James Earl Jones Theatre, fresh off a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Reviews for “Sign” were mixed, and a consensus formed that it was something of an unfinished work, with Hansberry having been too ill to properly edit and sculpt her sweeping vision. “Sign” was even more ambitious than “Raisin,” focusing on an eclectic group of bohemians trying to make their mark on a world that, as the title character would note at one point, was “about to crack right down the middle,” with the broadening civil rights movement heralding a new generation’s quest for autonomy and justice. Her follow-up, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” would run for about three months before closing on January 10, 1965, two days before Hansberry died at age 34.

In 1964, one of the era’s most promising young playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry, was dying of pancreatic cancer five years after becoming the first Black writer and the fifth woman to win a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, for “A Raisin in the Sun.” A piercing, rousing study of a Black family’s struggles and resilience, the play became an instant American classic.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry