Baldwin, James (1924-87)

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    Baldwin’s ‘Blues for Mister Charlie,’ 60 Years After It Hit Broadway

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    On the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, a look at this revolutionary work that was a playwriting milestone for him.One day, in the spring of 1964, among the glittering theater marquees of Times Square, James Baldwin was en route to rehearsal for his new Broadway production, “Blues for Mister Charlie” — and he’d had a lot on his mind: Four little girls had been killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., just months earlier; the white producers of his play had been after him to soften the script, suggesting it might be inappropriate for Broadway. By the time he reached the theater, he was furious.David Leeming, Baldwin’s friend and biographer, recently recalled that day’s “horrible rehearsal,” in which Baldwin stormed in and climbed a ladder. Towering over the cast and crew, he went on a tirade, Leeming, 87, said in an interview, “essentially accusing them of failing to see his vision.”Besides cutting a swear word or two from the script, Baldwin did not waver, though not without fear — fear of the form and fear that he might not adequately portray the monstrosity and humanity of white Southern hate. The critics eventually weighed in, writing of his failure on both fronts, and struggles at the box office ensured the playwright’s debut on Broadway would be brief.When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of 63, he left a voluminous oeuvre. Deemed a “prophet” and a “witness,” he has experienced a revival in the past decade that quickened in 2024 — with reading guides, film screenings and symposiums — for the centennial of his birth on Aug. 2.His legacy is often most embraced through his essays and fiction, though another form may have better suited his artistry: the play.“He loved the connection, the immediate connection between the audience and the artist that occurred in the theater,” Leeming said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Exploring James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry’s Friendship

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      The acclaimed writers are communing once again in productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” and “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.James Baldwin recalled first meeting Lorraine Hansberry in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan after a workshop production of “Giovanni’s Room,” a play based on his novel of the same name. The “biggest names in American theater” were there, he noted, and gave their critiques of the play. But then he locked eyes with a woman yet-unknown to the theater establishment who articulated a full appreciation of him and his work. Of that encounter, Baldwin wrote: “She talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”For the next seven years, Hansberry and Baldwin would continue to find moments of deep understanding, forging a relationship even though they often did not live in the same place. But their storied friendship was cut short by Hansberry’s untimely death at the age of 34 in 1965.This fall the two writers are communing once again at the Public Theater and, perhaps, finishing a few conversations, with productions of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” created by and co-produced with the Elevator Repair Service, and a revival of Hansberry’s classic play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” directed by Robert O’Hara.From left: John Clay III, Paige Gilbert and Tonya Pinkins in Robert O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” running through Oct. 23, presents a re-enactment of a 1965 debate between Baldwin, the writer and civil rights activist, and William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative founder of National Review. The two men argued the motion, “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.”The play provides a historical touch point for our fractious political present. The director John Collins said: “I think there are several ways to frame why you should listen to those you disagree with, and sometimes it is because one should allow for the possibilities that the people you don’t agree with might have something intelligent and worthwhile to say. The other reason, though, is to really understand the seriousness, and sometimes the danger, of these other arguments.”Drawing verbatim from the debate transcript, the play ends with an imagined conversation between Baldwin and Hansberry that was inspired by a 1961 discussion about Black Americans in culture. (In addition to Baldwin and Hansberry, the other participants included the essayist and publisher Emile Capouya, the journalist and social commentator Nat Hentoff, the poet Langston Hughes and the writer and critic Alfred Kazin.) While they focused primarily on the question of Black writers in American literature, they also considered the status of Black Americans.On the subject of crafting Black characters, Baldwin explained, “Faulkner has never sat in a Negro kitchen while the Negroes were talking about him, but we have been sitting around for generations, in kitchens and everywhere else, while everybody talks about us, and this creates a very great difference.”Hansberry confirmed, “Which is a different relationship, because the employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.” She continued as Baldwin and the rest of the room erupted in laughter, “We have been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.” The recording captures Baldwin and Hansberry’s intimacy and the joy they felt in each other’s company.Imani Perry, the Princeton University professor whose books include “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” describes theirs as “an intimate intellectual companionship. They are both deeply concerned with Black life and regular Black folks’ lives, and also think about the politics of race and its depiction in the public arena.”“He trusted her artistically, which is a big deal, for someone who is his junior, younger than him, and also when they became friends, he had a larger visible platform,” Perry said of Baldwin, who was 34 when he met a 28-year-old Hansberry. “It was a beautifully intimate friendship. It’s the kind of thing that I think every person who’s either an artist or intellectual, and certainly a person who’s both, yearns for.”Greig Sargeant as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry in the Elevator Repair Service’s production of “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” at the Public Theater.Richard Termine for The New York TimesGreig Sargeant, who plays Baldwin and conceived the play, notes that Elevator Repair Service wanted to show the public and private Baldwin. “We did some research,” he said, “and one of the things that we found was that article ‘Sweet Lorraine,’” the essay Baldwin wrote to eulogize his dear friend. In writing the last scene of the play, Sargeant and April Matthis, who originated the Hansberry role, consulted numerous essays, interviews and speeches. Baldwin and Hansberry “sharpen each other by having these debates,” Matthis said, “and it’s always loving, and it’s all meant to hold each other to account with so much love.”The Public Theater’s fall season also includes a revival of Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” about a Black family’s struggles to achieve their dreams within the constraints of a segregated America. The drama, directed by Robert O’Hara and opening on Oct. 19, centers on the Youngers and their decision to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago. It emphasizes the impact of desegregation.To drive home this point, O’Hara decided to include a scene with a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, that is usually cut from productions. “We know where they’re moving in many ways is more dangerous than where they were living,” he said. “I love the scene where Mrs. Johnson says she’s for ‘people pushing out.’ And then she says, but you might get bombed. She’s a harbinger of what the Youngers will face in suburban white America.”Ahead of the play’s historic premiere on Broadway (it was the first written by a Black woman to be produced there), Hansberry and Baldwin reunited in Philadelphia for its run at the Walnut Street Theater. Sargeant noted, “I read an article once where Baldwin said that the great thing about going to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ was that he had never seen so many Black people in the audience,” because “Black people ignored the theater because the theater ignored them.”“So now the good thing about being in 2022,” he added, “is that we have an institution that is making an effort to make positive changes for the future, having us both there at the same time, highlighting the relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry.”One hears in both O’Hara’s production of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge” a longing for missed conversations. “Baldwin” offers trenchant examinations of the American condition, and “Raisin” questions the American dream. “Lorraine Hansberry had this incredible, fantastic, lightning bolt of a play, and then she died so early,” O’Hara said. She did not live to see the Black power movement, or the queer women of color who led third-wave feminism. O’Hara continued, “Imagine what she would have been able to do if she were able to dream longer with us, and that’s what’s exciting, we can now acknowledge her queerness.”Producing the play in 2022, O’Hara anticipates the impact of the civil rights movement in the late 20th century, a period that Baldwin lived through and wrote about. He continued, “Doing it downtown, we can investigate some of the more difficult crevices.”The production takes on substance abuse, depression, sexism, classism, and the virulent racism that shaped mid-20th-century American society and continues to inform our own. O’Hara said his take on the American classic draws from his general approach to making art. “I live by this tenet as an artist and a human being that I will not be limited by your imagination,” he said. “Because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean that it’s unimaginable.” Similar to Baldwin and Hansberry’s exchanges, O’Hara said, “I bring a cavalcade of interesting and exciting people around me to push me into the future.”He noted the enduring importance of Hansberry’s classic and, similar to “Baldwin and Buckley,” how it anticipates our present. “I think of it as a tragedy in hindsight,” O’Hara said. “There’s uplift in the play of them wanting to move out of where they are. But I don’t want us to get lost in the glorious ending. They are moving into the white suburbs in 1959 Chicago. I just think about King saying that Chicago was more dangerous and more racist than the South.”These two works feature questions not only about the status of America but also the theater by remembering two iconic American artists. Baldwin and Hansberry challenge, as O’Hara noted, the idea that “there’s one type of Black story. There’s one type of reality that fits Blackness.” The story contains many more chapters waiting to be written. More

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      Review: Revisiting ‘Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge’

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      Elevator Repair Service, the experimental theater company, brings to life the 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.On Feb. 18, 1965, the Cambridge Union hosted a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. The resolution: “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin, unsurprisingly, spoke for the affirmative. Buckley, who agreed to appear after several other American conservatives had refused, opposed him.Elevator Repair Service, the experimental theater company, revives this discussion — every word of it and a few more — in “Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge,” directed by John Collins at the Public Theater in Manhattan. Greig Sargeant, a longtime company member who conceived the piece, stars as Baldwin. Ben Jalosa Williams, another veteran, plays Buckley. The set for this Cambridge University institution is minimal — two tables, two chairs, two tabletop lecterns. Sargeant and Williams don’t imitate the real men’s accents and cadences, the better to bring the debate closer, showing how germane its arguments remain, with Baldwin insisting that America has been built on the forced labor of its Black inhabitants and Buckley countering that if Black Americans would only put in the effort, they too could enjoy of its fruited plains. House lights stay on through most of the show, implicating the audience.“Baldwin and Buckley” overlaps with a couple of past E.R.S. shows. Williams has played Buckley at least once before, in the company’s “No Great Society,” which staged an episode of “The Steve Allen Show,” in which Jack Kerouac confronted establishment types. “Arguendo,” which opened at the Public in 2013, presented oral arguments from a Supreme Court case in which exotic dancers advocated for the right to perform nude. E.R.S. often works from texts — novels, verbatim transcripts — that are not intrinsically dramatic. The company tends to approach these texts obliquely, playfully, with an elbow to the ribs.There are few elbows here, however. Christopher Rashee-Stevenson, a Black actor, horses around with his part of a white Cambridge undergraduate who speaks on Buckley’s side. (Gavin Price, a white actor, plays the young man, also white, who bolsters Baldwin’s.) Otherwise the debate is staged with an unfrilled gravitas. Sargeant is forceful, with a tinge of Baldwin’s mannered veneer. Williams is lightly oleaginous. Neither relies on exaggeration or archness. The gonzo props and goofy sound design and butt dances of prior E.R.S. shows? These do not appear.What “Baldwin and Buckley” does provide feels both dense and thin, with the translation from transcript to theater incomplete. The arguments — even Buckley’s offensive ones, such as his contention that if Black Americans lack equality it’s because they lack the “particular energy” to attain it — are multifaceted, and as they speed along, unelucidated and uninterrupted, it is easy to lose the shape of them. The moral danger here could not be higher. Reduced to its essence, Buckley’s pro-meritocracy argument denies the effects of systemic racism, even while condemning individual instances of discrimination; Baldwin’s demands it. And yet, looking around the space, I saw several people quietly dozing.Sargeant is forceful, with a tinge of Baldwin’s mannered veneer.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt the close of the debate, the show glides into an invented scene, a conversation between Baldwin and his close friend Lorraine Hansberry (Daphne Gaines). Over drinks, they speak briefly of progress.“We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house,” Baldwin says.“Yes,” Hansberry agrees, “quickly.”But within two minutes they are playing themselves, Greig and Daphne, discussing how they met performing E.R.S.’s adaptation of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” a show that the company had originally staged without any Black actors. It’s a provocative scene, which calls out E.R.S.’s own past failings. Really it’s two provocative scenes. But they are over almost as soon as they begin.At the real debate, Baldwin won handsomely, 544 to 164 votes by union members. Today, one hopes, the breakdown would shake out even more emphatically. Because Buckley, I would argue, was wrong on every point, excepting those points on which he claimed to agree with Baldwin. But Baldwin wasn’t entirely right either. He concludes his remarks by saying that if America fails to have a true racial reckoning “there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, “because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”We are 57 years beyond these debates now. Some change has come, by means both quick and slow, but the house remains unrebuilt and the questions of whether the American dream still exists, whether it ever really existed, are vexed ones. But if the dream has been wrecked, it is not the denied who have done it. It is the groups and classes who started at the top. And then pulled the golden ladder up after them.Baldwin and Buckley at CambridgeThrough Oct. 23 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

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      The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Best of Enemies,’ a TV Duel Becomes a Theater Gem

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      James Graham’s new play draws parallels between the bad-tempered 1968 debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal and the rancorous public arena of today.LONDON — History comes hurtling to life in “Best of Enemies,” the latest attempt from the prolific playwright James Graham (“Ink,” “Quiz”) to put flesh on the bare bones of the past. Chronicling a sequence of televised face-offs that transfixed the United States in 1968, Graham once again shows a gift for mining the annals of politics and journalism for real theatrical gems. The result, at the Young Vic through Jan. 22, is the most riveting play in London just now.It helps that the personalities involved in those 10 TV debates were William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, two richly articulate men of any dramatist’s dreams. On the one side was Buckley (played here by David Harewood), founder of The National Review and a conservative grandee; on the other was Vidal (Charles Edwards), the pleasure-seeking novelist and playwright with two homes in Italy and a withering disregard for the “Christian values” Buckley espoused.Ideological opposites, the pair were brought together by ABC to restore the flagging ratings of a network dryly referred to early in the play as the “almost broadcasting company.” Drawing inspiration from a 2015 film documentary of the same name, Graham sets their increasingly barbed exchanges against the backdrop of a tumultuous summer. We’re reminded, via Luke Halls’s video design, of the riots and protests that were tearing at America, just as Buckley and Vidal tore into one another. (Bunny Christie’s set is a horseshoe-shaped soundstage with screens perched above the action.)Luke Halls’s video design, on screens in a set designed by Bunny Christie, evokes the turbulent summer of 1968.Wasi DanijuGraham’s narrative begins at the end, with his opponents clearly disturbed by a shift in their discussion from which there is no turning back. Vidal has denounced Buckley on air during the Democratic convention in Chicago as “a crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley has retaliated by dismissing Vidal as “queer.” The play then rewinds and charts the course back to that on-air debacle, but we also seem to be witnessing a descent into ad hominem argument that has only gathered in intensity to this day.Graham’s obvious theatrical prototype is “Frost/Nixon,” Peter Morgan’s 2006 play, which Ron Howard later made into a film. But the stakes here seem higher and the context broader: Jeremy Herrin’s deft production brings in cameos by Aretha Franklin (Justina Kehinde) — “they know who I am,” she snaps when she is introduced — and Andy Warhol (Tom Godwin). The actor John Hodgkinson, doubling parts, plays Chicago’s bellicose mayor, Richard Daley, and the ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith, both of whom he does well.James Baldwin (Syrus Lowe, excellent), another onetime debating opponent of Buckley’s, is seen now and again, commenting on the personalities and the fallout between them: “Whatever the hate, wherever it comes from, it will always eventually destroy the one hating,” he tells us.From left: Emilio Doorgasingh, Kevin McMonagle, Syrus Lowe and John Hodgkinson.Wasi DanijuGraham sufficiently connects the vitriol between Buckley and Vidal with the contempt, and worse, that dominates the airwaves now, but you slightly recoil when someone belabors a point. “More and more, we’re divided into our own communities of concern,” a media analyst (Kehinde again) remarks near the end, bemoaning the way in which TV has increasingly carved up American life.Even then, the feral energy between the two leads proves irresistible. Vidal is a plum role, and the wonderful Edwards is suitably dapper and silver-tongued, not least when on the offensive: “Do you read?” he asks Buckley. “You could learn a great deal.” We clock Vidal’s predatory eye — “speaking of eating, hello” he remarks libidinously to a young man (Sam Otto) who will become his aide and bedmate — alongside his exhaustive breadth of historical knowledge.Buckley, far from being the straw man of the pair, is arguably the more complicated. Casually disdainful and airily patronizing, he is given tremendous gravitas by Harewood, a Black British actor cunningly cast against expectation as a white establishment figure who was taken to task for bigotry more than once.Speaking in a lower register than Buckley, Harewood requires that we listen afresh to Buckley, as we do to Vidal: both men at ease with their characters’ fast-talking fluency of thought. And if their shared fate was to cross the line that separates reasonable debate from rancor, well, welcome to the world today, and to the coarsening of the public arena that “Best of Enemies” brings stingingly to life.Best of EnemiesThrough Jan. 22, 2022 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More