When you discovered the Baldwin-Buckley debate archives, what was it that struck you? What made you see this as material crying out for a contemporary adaptation?

Greig Sargeant: Quite by accident, I found the debate on YouTube. When I watched it, I thought to myself, “what they talk about still goes on today.” It’s amazing to me still to this day how very little has changed. Baldwin expresses the resentment of the fact that people of color in the United States have worked so hard to create this great country, only to be denied and labeled and not able to receive the opportunities of everyone else. He’s great in projecting this idea that there is so much inequality and people need to know that.
Baldwin does a brilliant job of weaving together a clear-eyed, lucid understanding of history and also human experience, his own experience. His anger is there, but he’s calm. He didn’t have the freedom to completely allow his emotions to come forward. Doing this now, we can allow that more, but it still has to be in tension with his control and calm and confidence. Personally, as a black man living in 2025, I’m not calm. Using his words is very resonant to me.

John Collins: The debate is intriguing and engaging in that they’re both extremely intellectual and well-read, which elevates it to a level you don’t necessarily hear now. When you listen to Buckley’s response, it sounds very much like the counterarguments being made today. Some of the facile and disingenuous arguments that you still hear now are very much what Buckley articulates. There’s a sort of eerie familiarity about all of it. It shows the power of these ahistorical arguments that say everybody just needs to work harder. The idea of the American dream is that everyone has equal access to opportunity, but one has to ignore so much to believe that.
Buckley’s argument is well-articulated. It’s interesting to listen to, but despite the elevated language and his obvious intelligence, it sits on top of several fallacies.

Why is it important for the audience to feel the tension between the 1965 text and its relevance today? And how does your approach to documentary theatre—which is very faithful to the original text—shape this collective experience?

JC: I feel very comfortable identifying ERS as experimental theatre, because these are experiments, and the experiment is always about what will happen when a text is placed on stage in front of a live audience without our changing or rewriting it. We’re always interested in what happens when you reframe the text, whatever it is—a debate, a hearing before the Supreme Court, a novel—as a live experience. A more traditional approach might be to adjust them, to make them fit a contemporary live situation, but we don’t want to do that. We like when there is friction between the text and the environment we place it in.
Ultimately, we’re very interested in the phenomenon of live performance, of something happening in real time in front a live audience in the same room. We bring two things together and see what they produce. In this case, it was a 60-year-old debate and the contemporary world we live in now. There’s a tension between an imagined reality and an absolutely undeniable present reality. I think when people go to the theatre, they want to be brought into an imagined experience. And I think those experiences are very special and unique in the theatre because the real architecture, the real presence of the people, is always a little bit at war with what you’re trying to imagine.

The debate also features two dramatically different speaking styles: the spirit of a preacher poet in the case of Baldwin, and polished academic language in the case of Buckley. How did you approach this tension?

GS: Baldwin was a youth minister growing up, and you can see elements of the church in his presentation of his message. He preaches and effectively uses that persona to get his point across. I studied that when learning the debate, the points that he makes with his language and rhythm and tone. It really informed me as to how to perform the piece. But it’s not an imitation. It really does come from the bottom of my soul, but the words and reasoning, I get from him. It takes everything I have to do it. When I finish, I’m exhausted. Physically, it’s a challenge.

JC: Buckley was an intellectual who was respected for his ideas, and we didn’t want to be completely dismissive of that. We have an actor in the company who actually played Buckley before, but it was a different, much lighter show. His impersonation is very funny and makes Buckley seem like kind of a clown, but in this show, we don’t want Buckley to seem like someone you don’t have to take seriously. People need to see that these are ideas that are being espoused now, that exist as threats to freedom and equality now, not just then. It needs to be a little scary, not like a funny character from the past.

The show includes an imagined scene between Baldwin and his friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, which shifts from public debate to more intimate territory. Running through this scene is the idea of “rebuilding the house.” What does this mean to you?

GS: We wanted to include that final scene so that we would get to hear Baldwin more personally—Baldwin the man, not just the activist. The house has to be rebuilt or else. It’s the only way. We have sit down at the table together and hash this thing out. Our country is so divided these days, and if we don’t rebuild the house now, Lord knows what’s going to happen.

JC: The scene is an opportunity for Baldwin to speak from his heart. It gives us a window into his thoughts about what must be done as opposed to just what the reality is. Everyone needs to understand that there is a certain mythology about this country that has to be torn down first before anything else can be built. Greig and April Mathis, who plays Lorraine Hansberry, saw a parallel in their own relationship as actors who worked with this company for a long time. They also refer to a Faulkner adaptation that we did, where the company was a victim of its own blind spot about race. The way forward was to be inclusive and bring others’ voices in, so I guess that’s a little model of what rebuilding is like.

Interview by Philippe Couture

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