Greig Sergeant (left) as James Baldwin and Daphne Gaines as Lorraine Hansberry, in a scene that follows Baldwin’s debate with William F. Buckley Jr. in Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge.
On Feb. 18, 1965, author James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain) and conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale) debated whether “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro” at Cambridge University in England. The debate generated excitement and interest at the time—as described by historian Kevin Schultz, more than 700 (white) students showed up, and filled the room to overflowing. The face-off, reenacted in Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge, has since become legendary, the subject of books and documentaries, in particular because of Baldwin’s brilliant dissection of race in America, which continues to be painfully relevant today.
William F. Buckley Jr. (Ben Jalosa Williams) makes a point during his debate with James Baldwin.
The hourlong production by the Elevator Repair Service is a riveting mixture of naturalism with occasional touches of theatricality and experimentation. The piece, conceived by long-time ERS company member Greig Sargeant, is staged verbatim, with a final, imagined scene between Baldwin and playwright Lorraine Hansberry (fittingly, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is now also playing in the same building).
The evening begins with the actors taking their seats in the front row of the Anspacher Theater, the lights still up. There is an audience announcement: a notice that this is the 55th anniversary season for the Public at Astor Place, a land acknowledgment, and then, seamlessly, the play begins: “It is the custom of the house for the first speaker in any debate to extend a formal welcome to any visitors to the house.” The words are spoken by Gavin Price, who plays Mr. Heycock, the debate’s first speaker (on some days the character is portrayed by Matthew Russell).
The lights dim for the debate’s first two speakers (the lighting design is by Alan C. Edwards): Heycock, representing Baldwin’s position, and Mr. Burford (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson), previewing Buckley’s. Burford is at pains to note that their side is not opposed to civil rights, but is rather simply arguing against the debate’s motion; Stevenson’s disingenuous tone here is just right, since the National Review, the magazine Buckley founded in 1955, staunchly opposed essentially all civil-rights advances in the 1950s and 1960s.
When Baldwin’s turn in the debate comes, following Buford, the lights go up, and they remain up through the remainder of the debate. This fosters a sense that the audience is in the here and now of the debate rather than watching its representation in a theater (a sense that director John Collins’s production also plays with and undercuts). Neither Sargeant, who plays Baldwin, nor Ben Jalosa Williams, as Buckley, perform overt impersonations of the men, with the exception of two brief moments when Williams briefly transforms his voice into Buckley’s signature transatlantic accent—a provocative moment of heightened theatricality, when time and reality seem to slip.
Gavin Price greets the Public audience and then portrays Mr. Heycock, who speaks briefly before Baldwin in the Cambridge debate.
Baldwin addresses the psychological distortions that result from white supremacy, both on victim and perpetrator; he makes clear that the evils of slavery have not been abolished for Black Americans, an argument that reaches its climax when he pivots to the first person: “I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.” Buckley concedes that discrimination exists but largely lays the blame on Black Americans, who, he says, have not taken advantage of opportunities.
Sargeant conveys Baldwin’s devastating brilliance, and Williams captures Buckley’s smarmy yet clever intellectual dishonesty without caricature. Despite Baldwin’s resounding victory based on the Cambridge audience’s voting, there is something elegiac at the conclusion of the debate, which arises from the production’s reminders, such as the use of old, grainy audio for introducing speakers, that we are watching something from another era: it is jarring that the content from 1965 feels so apt in 2022. Yet Sargeant also finds some hope in continuing the dialogue: Baldwin’s “words must be heard and the conversation must continue for our society to evolve,” he writes in a dramaturgical note.
The final scene between Baldwin and Hansberry (Daphne Gaines) was written by Sargeant and company member April Matthis, and it has the two friends sharing a drink and talking race and politics. As the conversation turns toward Mississippi writer William Faulkner, the play breaks through to present day, and Baldwin and Hansberry become Greig and Daphne, discussing ERS’s production of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and how it originally had all white actors, even for the Black characters. “And that’s how we met!” Greig says. “We were brought in to be the black people.” Here again, the struggles of the past reveal themselves as belonging to our present.
The Elevator Repair Service production of Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge runs through Oct. 23 at the Public Theater (425 Lafayette St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday–Sunday; matinees are at 1:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting publictheater.org.
