Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge
The innovative, acclaimed Elevator Repair Service specializes in detailed, revealing adaptations of classic works. They first made a splash at Fringe with “Gatz,” an eight-hour adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” that later toured the world. They return with a new play that fuses documentary theater and artistic imagination, dramatizing a historical debate between Black queer author James Baldwin and the notoriously homophobic conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. The iconic lesbian playwright Lorraine Hansberry is also a character.
In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Jr. were invited to The Cambridge University Union to debate the resolution “The American Dream is at the Expense of The American Negro.” The result was a provocative and profoundly insightful confrontation between Baldwin, one of the most powerful figures of the civil rights movement, and Buckley, often considered the father of 20th Century patrician conservatism. New York-based performance ensemble Elevator Repair Service, a company with a rich history of adapting unconventional texts, stages the debate verbatim.
In an intimate and dramatic counterpoint, the final scene of the performance features a brief, imagined exchange between Baldwin and his close friend and confidante Lorraine Hansberry, who died only weeks before the debate. Baldwin and Hansberry are portrayed by veteran ERS actors Greig Sargeant and April Matthis, who—speaking both as their characters and themselves—contemplate what it means to be a Black artist working within and confronting historically white frameworks.
With both 1965 and 2021 in mind, Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge—through a starkly simple design and an acting style that favors intimacy over impersonation—presents the debate as real, immediate, and of this moment.
