Hansberry Play Has Sensitive Schneider Style

By Peter Bellamy NEW YORK-Alan Schneider, who some 30 years ago was a director at Cain Park Theater of Cleve land Heights, has since risen to be one of the theater world's most distinguished directors.

Among other things he has directed all of Nobel Prize-winner Samuel Beckett's plays in the United States. He has, in addition,

directed Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "A Delicate Balance," as well as Robert Anderson's "I Never Sang For My Father."

He has also directed the current revival at Broad-

bellamy on broadway

and white younger generations against the mores of the older generations. Many of her lines are elo-

in Greenwich Village, smug but desperately unhappy in their Bohemian life-style.

way's Longacre Theater of quent and they teem with Sidney Brustein is an ul-

the late Lorraine Hansberry's drama "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window." It bears his sensitive compassion for the feelings of alienation, frustration and despair which now grip most of the human race.

THERE ARE a number of brilliant performances in this revival. Music and lyrics have been added to comment on the play's actions and characters somewhat in the manner of a Greek chorus.

Miss Hansberry was uncommonly observant of the universality of the human comedy and tragedy. She was the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critic's Circle Ward for her "A Raisin in the Sun,' '' which was about blacks.

In "The Sign In Sidney Brustein's Window," which has only one black character, she also demonstrates her acute feeling for the contradictions, alienations and frustrations that beset whites.

She shows that blacks and whites have similar spiritual problems, including the rebellion of both the black

classical allusions. The statement by one of her female characters that

"

"There are two kinds of loneliness-one with a man and one without a man," could have been said by a woman of any color, race or creed since the dawn of

man.

WITH ONE exception the visible characters of the play have rejected the values and beliefs of their parents and found nothing solid to replace them. They live

cerated Jewish alcoholic, who has failed at running a folk music night club and becomes the tool of corrup-

tion when he runs an avantgarde weekly newspaper. He is played with dramatic manic-depressive intellectual despair by Hal Linden.

His wife, who is half Greek, part Cherokee Indian and part Irish, is a would-be actress with no talent. She is quick to spot her husband's defections, but loath to recognize her

own.

She is portrayed by Zohra Lampert, a young lady of enormous animation, femininity, sexiness and emotional range. She is utterly touching as an appealing young lady with the ele-

of a born loser. Her younger sister, a fancy call girls with a death wish, is ennacted with compelling sympathy and heart break by Kelly Wood,

FRANCES Sternhagen as the older sister all but steals the show as the complacently righteous one who can accept having a call girl in the family but is horrified at the thought of her marrying a black man.

William Atherton eloquently projects the spiritual isolation of homosexual playwright. John Danelle is

tellingly wrathful when he discovers that the white girl he wanted to marry représents the white man's leavings which have made him a light-skinned black.

Mason Adams in the role of an oily, unscrupulous pol itician is a type familiar to both black and white worlds. The music and lyr ics by Gary William Friedman and Ray Errol Fox are William undistinguished. Ritman's set is authentic Greenwich Village.