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.
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