James Baldwin (Teagle F. Bougere) and William F. Buckley Jr. (Eric T. Miller) face off about the American Dream in Debate (photo © Antonio M. Rosario)
DEBATE: BALDWIN VS BUCKLEY
The Great Room at A.R.T./New York, South Oxford Space
138 South Oxford St., Brooklyn
Friday – Sunday, March 5 – April 3, $25
www.theamericanvicarious.org
On February 18, 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. faced off in a televised debate at the Cambridge Union at the University of Cambridge in England, answering the question “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” MP Norman St. John Stevas introduced the event by saying it could be “one of the most exciting debates in the whole hundred and fifty years of the union history” as he noted that undergraduates had packed the debate hall and were flocking outside to be a part of this seminal happening, which began with arguments from students David Heycock and Jeremy Burford, setting up the two sides of the issue. The forty-year-old Baldwin, essayist, activist, playwright, and author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Another Country, and the forty-year-old Buckley, author of Up from Liberalism and Rumbles Left and Right: A Book About Troubling People and Ideas and founder of the conservative National Review, then made their cases, standing in front of a microphone at a podium one at a time. You can watch the original debate here.
In the fall of 2020, amid the pandemic lockdown, the american vicarious, in collaboration with BRIC, re-created that fascinating evening with Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley, three live, online presentations directed by Christopher McElroen. The show can now be seen in person, with the same team, when it comes to A.R.T./New York’s South Oxford Space in Brooklyn. Teagle F. Bougere (The Tempest, A Raisin in the Sun) plays Baldwin, with Eric T. Miller (Mope, rogerandtom) as Buckley; the cast also features Spencer Hamp and Charlie O’Rourke, with costumes by Elivia Bovenzi, sound by Andy Evan Cohen, and video and graphic design by Adam J. Thompson.
“The objective of the american vicarious in restaging this historic debate is not to inhabit such monumental figures as James Baldwin or William F. Buckley Jr.; their shoes are too large to fill,” McElroen (STATIC APNEA, Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation), the founding artistic director of the american vicarious, said in a statement. “Rather, our desire is to simply place their words, which still resonate fifty-five years later, within the voice of contemporary artists.” The debate tackles many issues that are still relevant today, from systemic racism to white supremacy to voter suppression; it is also not anything like the 2020 debates between Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden and then Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. It harkens back to a day when civilized, intellectual discourse was still part of politics and everyday life in an America that is not so recognizable anymore — or has it not really changed that much, for better or worse?