Who doesn’t love a good William Buckley imitation? Those lubricious WASPy vowels, with their built-in, faintly nasal sneer? Promoting the ultra-conservative agenda with the polish of a hyper-educated snake-oil salesman, Buckley was – and remains, 15 years after his demise – deliciously loathsome.
If resurrecting that repugnance is your main motivation for seeing Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge – that and the opportunity to sit at the knees of the profoundly wise, oracular James Baldwin – brace yourself for disappointment.
The hour-long production is a bit of a bait-and-switch. Yes, we get to hear every word of the famed 1965 Cambridge Union exchange, addressing the motion “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” The very framing of the question represented an insult to Baldwin – to the history he shared and survived – but of course he rose to the challenge.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
If your goal is to savor Baldwin’s response, mull it over, plumb its depths, you may need to resort to the historical record or better yet YouTube, where the exchange is preserved for posterity.
For whatever reason (artiness?), Elevator Repair Service “conceptualizer” Greig Sargeant and director John Collins evidently decided to quash any semblance of verisimilitude, beyond a vague physical resemblance. The actors – Sargeant himself as Baldwin, Ben Jalosa Williams as Buckley – steadfastly withstand the temptation to replicate the timbre and even rhythm of these familiar figures’ speech patterns.
Williams – who sounds mostly blandly Midwestern and is far more physically animated than Buckley ever allowed himself to be – delves into the jaded-prepster patois exactly twice, leading the listener to wonder whether there was something special about these particular passages that warranted underscoring. (If there was, I’ve failed to ferret it out.) Maybe these “lapses” result from force of habit: Williams reportedly aced a Buckley imitation in the 2006 Elevator Repair Service show “No Great Society.”
Concomitantly, Sargeant stirs from a just-the-facts delivery and allows himself to erupt in a furious, heartfelt froth when Baldwin claims, “I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.” Any listener untouched by this speech would have to be made of steel.
The script also encompasses the prefatory student arguments. Mr. Heycock (two actors alternate in the role) initially appears to be tasked with making the usual audience announcements (cell phones, etc.); he then seamlessly segues into the “pro” statement, earnest and reasonable. On the con side, Mr. Burford (Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, counter-cast as a racist) has apparently been instructed to act outrageous, playful and larkish. Unlike the actual Burford, a sober-sided wonk, Stevenson – presumably under directorial orders – is antic to the point of annoying, even as the words out of his mouth appall. The choice stacks a deck in no need of further stacking.
And then we get what we came for, the big-name mano a mano – which we might appreciate more fully were it not mostly delivered at breakneck speed, depriving us of the chance to react, delve deep, and absorb.
Elevator Repair Service has made a name for itself presenting classic texts as feats of memorization, divorced from specifics of time and place: 2010’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, became Gatz, transposed into an office setting. Even so, it was fully enacted, not just rattled off.
What could be the purpose of having us witness a reenactment of this legendary exchange stripped of context and personality? Perhaps the point is to gather a presumably sympathetic audience in an act of communal expiation – prematurely.
The one addition ERS has made to the historical Baldwin vs. Buckley transcript is a brief, imagined, out-of-the-spotlight post-debate moment shared by Baldwin and playwright Lorraine Hansberry – the gist of which is commiserative eye-rolling.
Unfortunately, this lagniappe reads like an unsubtle promo for the Public’s production of A Raisin in the Sun, set to start its run October 23 just as the debate signs off. It’s then we’ll get to see racism’s insidious impact on a familial microcosm – and be reminded how little has changed in the half-century-plus since Hansberry made her mark and Baldwin bravely stood up to the Buckleys of this world.
