Thursday, July 25, 2024
Tonight, Thursday, July 25, at 7 p.m., the National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave. NW, will present “Celebrating James Baldwin’s 100th Birthday: His Legacy and Influence on Literature, Film and Theater.”
Moderated by author Darnell L. Moore, the in-person and online panel (free, registration required) will feature playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, author Robert Jones Jr. and researcher Tulani Salahu-Din, who curated the museum’s digital exhibition “Chez Baldwin.” (The title refers to Baldwin’s mostly demolished house in the South of France, where he died of stomach cancer in 1987.)
Other D.C.-area events will take place before, on and after Baldwin’s actual birthday, Aug. 2.
Though a novelist — beginning with the semi-autobiographical “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “Giovanni’s Room,” which depicts a gay (white) relationship — and an essayist, whose brilliant magazine writing was first collected in “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin wrote two compelling plays.
The program and press release for “The Amen Corner,” premiered by the Howard Players in 1955, are in the NMAAHC’s collection. Director Owen Dodson invited the playwright to the Howard University campus — Baldwin’s first time in the South — to offer input. On the back of the release is a cut-off handwritten note that concludes: “He had left me a legacy, my father — as it was said in the Bible, not bread but a stone.”
The play, about a woman pastor in a Harlem storefront church, draws on Baldwin’s experiences growing up with a judgmental pastor stepfather and losing his faith as a teenage preacher. Shakespeare Theatre Company’s gospel-filled production, directed by Whitney White, was staged in the spring of 2020 and, after a pandemic interruption, the fall of 2021.
Baldwin’s second play, “Blues for Mister Charlie,” was the first to reach Broadway, in April of 1964. Dedicated to “the memory of Medgar Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead children in Birmingham,” the play is loosely based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. After living in Paris from 1948 to 1957, Baldwin had been pulled back to the U.S. to lend his voice to the civil rights movement.
Remarkably, he was one of three Black playwrights to have New York productions that year. Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, had four of his provocative (if not inflammatory) one-acts presented off-Broadway. “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a play set in Greenwich Village with only one Black character, opened three months before the death of “Raisin in the Sun” playwright Lorraine Hansberry from pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. Last year’s Brooklyn Academy of Music revival went to Broadway.
Two years prior to the “Blues for Mister Charlie” premiere, the New Yorker had published what is perhaps Baldwin’s most famous essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind,” republished in the 1963 book “The Fire Next Time.”
Baldwin was close to both Baraka and Hansberry, but in different ways. Baraka wrote in 2007: “Even when I criticized Jimmy as a young man, when I first saw him as an undergraduate at Howard University, with ‘The Amen Corner,’ I still understood that his direct TV eyes had daunted and welcomed me into our writing, from the cover of ‘Notes of a Native Son.’ And disguised behind the infantile ‘yo brother’ I hurled at him, he saw the younger brother, as he called me, the younger brother chiding the older brother to get on it.”
In “Sweet Lorraine,” his introduction to “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a posthumously published book of Hansberry’s journals, letters and interviews by her ex-husband, Baldwin wrote: “We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street and, later, Waverly Place flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, ‘Really, Jimmy. You ain’t right, child!’”
On Saturday, Sept. 7, at 1 p.m., the Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike in North Bethesda, Maryland, will host “Go the Way Your Blood Beats: Young Artists Honor James Baldwin.” Students from Howard University’s Department of Theatre Arts will perform scenes from “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mister Charlie,” directed by Howard’s Dr. Khalid Y. Long. There will also be an overview of Baldwin’s contributions to African American theater. Virtual and in-person registration is available on Eventbrite (free, $10 or “choose what you pay”).
On Monday, Sept. 9, at 7 p.m., a staged reading of “Blues for Mister Charlie” will be performed by students from George Mason University’s School of Theater in GMU’s Blackbox Theater, 4400 University Drive in Fairfax, Virginia. More information will be posted at cheusecenter.gmu.edu. Please note: “Blues for Mister Charlie” includes repeated use of the N-word and unfiltered depictions of Southern racism.
Close to home, next Thursday, Aug. 1, at 5:30 p.m., the NMAAHC’s Salahu-Din will give a talk, “Why Baldwin Matters Today,” at the Georgetown branch of the District of Columbia Public Library, 3260 R St. NW. Also part of this free event: a jazz performance and birthday cake, served at 6:15 p.m.
The same night, Aug. 1, at 5 p.m., A Gathering of the Tribes and ARS Poetica will present “James Baldwin’s 100th Birthday Slam” in the Kogod Courtyard of the National Portrait Gallery, 800 G St. NW. Free registration is available on Eventbrite.
Later next month — on Thursday, Aug. 22, from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. — the Portrait Gallery’s Big Ideas Book Club invites early readers and their companions to discuss “Jimmy’s Rhythm & Blues: The Extraordinary Life of James Baldwin” by Michelle Meadows, illustrated by Jamiel Law, then look at portraits and make a “takeaway.” Free registration is available on Eventbrite.
On view at the Portrait Gallery through April 20, 2025, is “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance.” Curated by the gallery’s Rhea Combs in consultation with New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, the exhibition displays photographs, letters, books, a record album by Nina Simone and paintings by Beauford Delaney.
Finally, on Baldwin’s birthday, Friday, Aug. 2, at 7 p.m., Strathmore will present a free screening of the 1989 PBS American Masters documentary “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket,” with a conversation by director Karen Thorsen and GMU’s Dr. Keith Clark, at the AFI Silver Theatre & Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland.