Action or Ennui?

Ron Menzel

We live in a world rife with inequality and oppression. Loraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, asks us, will you take action and die for the uncertainty of an egalitarian future in which you would have no part, or will you take no action and survive with the certainty of oppression?

A realist mid-century American play, Sign brings us a group of marginalized individuals asking that question. Not one of them finds a satisfactory answer. Therein lies the plays strength: Hansberry asks the question, and, while she may tend towards taking action, she doesn't presume to answer for us.

The story takes place in 1964 Greenwich Village, and revolves around Jewish Sidney (Ron Menzel) and his mixed-race Cherokee wife Iris (Sofie Jean Gomez). Sidney is a leftist agitator who surrounds himself with a cast of like-minds, all in a friendly competition to out-proletariat each other. There's Alton Scales (Armando McClain), a proud black man who is constantly mistook for a white man, due to his mixed-race ancestry. There's Wally O'Hara (Danforth Comins), the political candidate whose sign is in Sidney Brustein's window. And there's David Ragin (Benjamin Pelteson), the gay playwright upstairs. Iris is a showgirl, generally considered within the cast of characters as talentless. Nevertheless, she has dreams of making it big on Broadway. Her sisters, the anti-Semitic Mavis (Erica Sullivan), who is caught in an unfaithful and stable marriage; and high-end call girl Gloria (Vivia Font), who is addicted to pills, round out the cast.

The first act is filled with dramatic dialogue, fraught with characters' objectives and conflicts. Its function is to allow us to get to know these people, and serves as the foundation and context for the second act. It's in the second act that the characters offer their answers to the question of action versus ennui. It's monologue-heavy, with most of the characters laying out their case to Sidney, who is struggling to answer the question himself.

"Monologue-heavy" may sound like code for "pedantic, declamatory and boring," but, in this case, it's not. The monologues are dramatic in that they represent a struggle to between action and ennui. And, in the context of the Freedom Rides and the threat of violent death posed by a monolithic conservative resistance to egalitarian agitators, it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do, you could be brutally killed. And your death may not matter. There's no way to know that things will change. But if you don't, you'll live, but live oppressed. You will never be able to realize everything you want out of life, but at least you'll still have life.

Loraine Hansberry took action. A black gay woman, she certainly did not fit the description of those who held the key to the kingdom, the white straight men. But she was a playwright - she spoke out. She could very well have taken the pedantic, declamatory, boring route. But she didn't. She wrote complicated characters from a realist perspective, not simplistic caricatures who are little more than propaganda. As humans, their struggle rings true from a human perspective. By showing us people who share our strengths, our weaknesses, our hopes, our fears, she forces us to ask this question for ourselves: action and a meaningful death, or ennui and a meaningless life?

So how do you answer that question? Do you have an answer, or are you still working on it? Because you oughtn't for a minute think the Civil Rights Act solved everything. Class in America is still race-based: the top 1% is mostly white, and the bottom 1% lives on reservations. Our LGBT neighbors are still not afforded equal protection under the law. It's worth noting, however, that going to see plays implies a certain level of privilege. And, as Wally opines, one needs the power that privilege affords to be able to effect positive change. But, if one simply goes to plays that struggle with issues of equality in order to feel progressive, one is little more than a salon socialist. The function of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window isn't to make us feel like good leftists. Instead, it asks us a complicated question that we are then to take home with us and struggle to answer.