Guilt Collectors

The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, by Lorraine Hansberry, has too many minds of its own. It is overloaded, overwritten and overwrought. It is about guilt and guilt collectors, venting their oral-compulsive laments in a Greenwich Village setting. Through the play troop the Quixotes who venture into political quicksands, the soiled hipsters of success and the purist false priests of failure, self-deceiving bohemians, homosexuals, husbands, wives, artists and whores. Everything overlaps and the play has diversity without direction. It endlessly circles its own conversation pit.

Feeding out the play's entangling plot lines are Sidney Brustein (Gabriel Dell), a disabused idealist who still quivers at the drop of a line from Thoreau, and his wife Iris (Rita Moreno), a would-be Duse who is ready, to stoop to TV commercials. They would rather bicker and brood than curse and make up. In the intervals between their somewhat tiresome spats, the best scenes and acting of the play occur. Top honors go to Alice Ghostley as Iris' proper older sister, an inflated marshmallow of a woman. In one bravura monologue, she tells of her years-long accommodation to her husband's mistress and his four sons, only three of whom are also hers. Another bitterly eloquent, if slightly self-pitying scene is provided by Ben Aliza as the Negro wooer of Iris' younger sister. Shattered to learn that his love has been a high-priced call girl, he recounts a childhood episode in which his porter father once swept the family table bare, vowing never again to live off "the white man's leavings."

While scenes like this flame up, the play as a whole has the hazy look of a smudge fire. Lorraine Hansberry's intelligence is sharp, her writing can be distinctive, and she has X-ray vision when it comes to spotting the steel or the sponge in a character. But she needs to recover the dramatic directness and drive of her prizewinning first play, A Raisin in the Sun.

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