Creating 1960s Greenwich Village For ‘The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window’

In playwright Loraine Hansbury’s script for “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” she describes the setting as “the Brustein apartment and adjoining courtyard in Greenwich Village, New York City, in the early 1960s.”

“What she doesn’t prescribe,” says dots, the scenic design collective behind a new production of the play for BAM starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan, “is how any of that context relates to the theater itself, the behavior of the actors or to the emotional content of the piece. So there was a ton of room for discovery in terms of how we wanted the apartment to feel, and function as a theatrical space.”

In a recent interview, Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk, and Kimie Nishikawa explored the contemporary resonances of the show, as well as the democratic vision behind dots.

Can you share with us how Dots came about? How would you describe what’s unique about the collective’s approach to scenic design for theater?

Dots’ origin story is very much a product of the pandemic. During the 2020 shutdown, the three of us found ourselves suddenly and shockingly without any work. Our usually unmanageable schedules became totally open so we seized the opportunity to actually stop and reflect, check in with each other and talk about the realities of being theater artists in New York City at that particular moment, and the question we kept asking ourselves was, “Why are we competing with each other?” We shared so much admiration for each other’s work and affection for each other as humans that working collaboratively seemed like a far more sustainable and harm-reductive way to move forward.

The previous working model for scenic design (aka with a single designer + associates and assistants) is also something we’re trying to move away from because of how it can open the door to gate-keeping and exclusivity. We’re committed to building something that’s bigger and stronger than any of us could achieve individually and stand behind our belief that the value of the whole will always be greater than the sum of its parts. So far the benefits of working this way, for us, as young immigrant theater artists, have been innumerable.

In terms of our approach, which is derived from a sensibility that connected the three of us to begin with, we try to avoid a particular style and find tremendous excitement in the process of discovery that comes with each new project. Our role as designers is to uncover the unique aesthetic potential that comes with each new script and each new creative team. We love the almost forensic process that embraces the unknown, rather than imposing a tried and tested design aesthetic on every project. Working as a collective allows us the freedom to indulge in that process rather than rely on the old bag of tricks we were finding ourselves having to pull from as individuals because of the need to produce work at a fast enough rate to survive financially.

As for how our name came about, that’s our fun little secret…

What excited you about bringing 1960s Greenwich Village to the stage for “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window”?

The context of the 1960s and the beatniks and bohemians of Greenwich Village was super exciting for us because of its incredible resonances with our own time and our own culture. Sidney has this line toward the end of the play where he says to his seemingly conservative sister in law that “The world is about to crack wide open and we need to change, or we’ll fall right into the crack.” That shifting cultural landscape of the time — politically, socially, aesthetically — felt so similar to our own experience of New York City and indeed the USA, in the last few years, having attended marches and rallies together for Trans Rights, Black Lives, Reproductive Justice, as well as in our own work advocating for pay equity and transparency in the theater, that we really felt like we were presenting artist culture of today as well as of the time.

Another exciting prompt that led our early discussions with Anne Kauffman was the idea of a society under construction, and how building community is an ongoing process that we wanted to represent or acknowledge on stage.

How would you describe what audiences can expect from your scenic design for the show?

When starting the show, we wanted to foreground the theatrical space of the Harvey Theater in all its beauty so having the set inhabit the theater in a meaningful way was a goal for us, meaning that we wanted to bring the action as close to the audience as possible and ensuring equal visual access to the show to the best of our ability. Thankfully the Harvey has pretty forgiving sightlines but we worked to make sure as many seats as we could would have a solid connection to the phenomenal work of the cast, who bring the story to life with such incredible sensitivity and nuance.

At the same time, we wanted the world of Sidney and Iris’s apartment to exist in as much realistic detail as possible, like a jewel box of naturalism, suspended in a more metaphorical framework of real engineered steel. Sidney and David Ragin (Sidney and Iris’s playwright neighbor) have this running debate throughout the play about “Ibsenesque naturalism” versus David’s more absurd approach to theater writing which is reflected in the text of the play itself so we wanted the visual world to support both Hansberry’s naturalistic moments of seeing real humans behave in real space but use the ingredients of that naturalism to evoke the more poetic moments that Anne has staged so surprisingly and wonderfully. No spoilers, but there are some fun surprises in store.