Theatre in Review: Debate: Baldwin vs. Buckley (the american vicarious)

	Teagle F. Bougere, Eric T. Miller. Photo: Christopher McElroen

A storied moment from the 1960s -- one which casts a long shadow over today's divided America -- is recreated in this theatre piece now playing at the Great Room at the ART/New York South Oxford Space in Brooklyn. It's a recreation of the famous debate, at Oxford, between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley. The proposition: "Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?" I'm sure I need not tell you who was on which side.

You can see the original debate on YouTube, although the quality of the film is poor. The event played to a packed house, as both men were by then literary celebrities. (As someone notes, Baldwin's novel Another Country was published in the UK on the same day.) On film or in the theatre, it's really no contest: Baldwin wipes the floor with Buckley -- who, one can tell, senses that his arguments aren't going over, affecting a stoic, studied good humor in the face of defeat.

With his resonant speaking voice and a delivery honed from his preaching days -- not to mention his novelist's ear for effective phrasing -- Baldwin speaks powerfully from personal experience, detailing the corrosive effects of everyday racism decades before anyone knew the term "microaggression." He deftly expands his viewpoint to note how America was built on "cheap labor," adding, in incantatory fashion, "I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else's whip, for nothing. For nothing." Turning the argument against Buckley even before the latter has had a chance to speak, he insists that racism destroys the souls of those who practice it, with grave consequences for the republic: "I suggest further that in the same way the moral life of Alabama sheriffs, and poor Alabama ladies -- white ladies -- that their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color, that the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it." He also avers that, for these reasons, America is a tinderbox, a prophecy that would soon be born out in Watts, Detroit, and elsewhere.

Did Buckley not understand what he was getting into? Reviews of The Fire is Upon Us, Nicholas Buccola's history of the debate, suggest otherwise, that Buckley, having identified Baldwin as a threat to Christianity and Western civilization, had already commissioned a takedown of him in the National Review. Still, his remarks almost entirely miss the point. He begins with a pro forma denunciation of prejudice before insisting that Baldwin's "neurotic mission" will do more harm than good. Instead of engaging with the devastating of effects of racism -- in human misery, for starters, but also in terms of social and economic progress -- he tries to wave them away, suggesting that things are ever so much better now, and if there are only a few hundred more Black doctors than a half century earlier, well, whose fault is that?

Pressing his point, Buckley insists that the nation is filled with medical schools ready -- nay, eager -- to take Black applicants, adding, by way of citing the "prominent Jewish intellectual" Nathan Glazer, "But in fact that particular energy, which he remarks was so noticeable in the Jewish community, and to a certain and lesser extent, in the Italian, Irish community, for some reason is not there." Just think: Even the Irish and the Italians have more initiative! It's not often that one can offend four ethnic groups in one sentence, but Buckley was peerless. And his rhetorical style -- his face poised upward at a 45-degree angle, his voice droning with unearned superiority, that prep-school smirk -- all but guarantees that he will bomb in front of a young, earnest, socially engaged audience.

In replicating the event in front of a contemporary (and, on the night I attended, mixed-race) audience, Christopher McElroen's production revivifies it, strongly suggesting, as the film does only minimally, the simmering tension in the room. I wish that both lead actors didn't rush their speeches quite so much; there are additional layers of irony yet to be mined. (With a running time of only an hour, they could profitably linger over certain points.) Still, Teagle F. Bougere captures Baldwin's indignation, which is all the more powerful for being so carefully controlled; the deadpan looks with which he receives Buckley's provocation are priceless. Eric T. Miller, an actor who really should be more well-known, nails Buckley's haute-WASP manner as well as his submerged awareness that he is losing the room. ("I know that statistics disturb some of you," he mutters, defensively, before irrelevantly citing homicide numbers among the Watusi.)

What really astonishes is how little progress has been made since that night fifty-seven years ago. Baldwin makes points that, today, are being echoed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Isabel Wilkerson. And Buckley's ideas, stripped of their oleaginous qualities, are echoed by the likes of Andrew Sullivan. And we are, somehow, more apart than ever. Everyone agrees that racism is terrible, but nobody can agree on what to do about it. It's a sobering reminder that, instead of an artificial debate, what this country needs is a frank conversation combined with hard listening and a desire for real change. --David Barbour