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"THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN'S WINDOW": A BLACK PLAYWRIGHT LOOKS AT WHITE AMERICA

DAVID E. NESS

TOWARD THE END OF Lorraine Hansberry's play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, two of the characters encounter each other fairly intimately: they are Sidney, a free-thinking, semi-intellectual Jewish young man in his late thirties, living in Greenwich Village; and his middle-class sister-in-law, Mavis Parodus. Sidney has always pictured Mavis's life as stodgy, uneventful and conventional, but she has just stunned him by revealing that she knows of her own husband's marital infidelity, and that she has seen the child by his mistress. Why, she asks her, didn't she get a divorce? "A divorce?" she replies. "For what? Because marriage was violated? ...And what would I do? There is no rush years ago at home to marry Mavis Parodus; there was just Fred then. In this world there are two kinds of loneliness and it is given to each of us to pick. I picked. And, let's face it, I cannot type." Then Sidney asks, "What do you do... I mean..?" and Mavis answers, "To make up for Fred, you mean? I take care of my boys. I shop and I worry about my sisters. It's a life." To which Sidney says, "'Witness, you ever-burning lights above!' You're tough, Mavis Parodus."

This intimacy of Sidney and Mavis surprises us in the play as it is meant to, for previously Sidney has expressed only contempt for Mavis, and spoken of her as "Queen of the Philistines." But, to put aside momentarily the question of what part their encounter plays int he drama itself, this incident surprises us in another way, too: what, we may ask, is Lorraine Hansberry doing here, among the white, more or less conventional middle class in Greenwich Village? She is a dramatist whose work has taken us through intense historical and racial conflicts, among other places in the Southside ghetto of Chicago, in black Africa, and on a pre-Civil War Southern

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David Ness is an English teacher and guidance counselor in New York City. The work of Lorraine Hansberry was the subject of his Master's Thesis.

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