HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAMES BALDWIN

WHEN HE FOUGHT - WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM PAUL NEWMAN - TO KEEP HIS PLAY "BLUES FOR MR. CHARLIE" OPEN ON BROADWAY

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty,” wrote Jame Baldwin in his play Blues for Mr. Charlie. I finished watching the Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward documentary on HBO this morning on James Baldwin’s birthday. The documentary left me weepy - I will write more about it later this week - and wondered how the deeply unsentimental Newman would have reacted to my reaction to this series about his life and career.

One of the things I admired about Newman was his unsentimental take on politics and his engagement with it - especially during the 1960s with the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War Movements. I was also curious about his friendship with Baldwin through their roles as artists engaged with politics so I Googled their names together and Baldwin’s play Blues for Mr. Charlie - which was loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till and dedicated to Medgar Evers - came up as a connective cultural tissue in their lives. One of the documentary’s focuses was Newman’s involvement with The Actor’s Studio and Baldwin’s play had been produced by The Actors Studio Theatre in 1964 before moving to the ANTA Theatre on Broadway. It was directed by Burgess Meredith. Its cast included Diana Sands, Joe Don Baker, Al Freeman, Jr., Pat Hingle, Rip Torn, Ralph Waite, and Ann Wedgeworth.

(Above: James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. at the celebration of another birthday celebration for W.E.B. Du Bois' 100th on February 23, 1968.)

But the play - which got mostly a rave from The New York Times’s theatre critic, Howard Taubman, in the paper’s April 24, 1964, edition - struggled at the box office and was scheduled to close after only a month. This is the headline and the story in The New York Times I discovered when Googling Baldwin’s name with Newman’s. It is from the paper’s May 27, 1964, edition.

BALDWIN FIGHTS FOR PLAY'S LIFE; Author Tries to Avert Close of ‘Blues for Mr. Charlie'

James Baldwin, author of “Blues for Mister Charlie,” is conducting an intensive campaign to avert the closing of the play Saturday night at the ANTA Theater.

If the provisional closing notice is not removed by tomorrow, the Actors Studio Theater's production will be forced to close after its 44th performance.

Seventy‐five persons, headed by the Rev. Sidney Lanier, vicar of St. Clement's Protestant Episcopal Church, 423 West 46th Street, are raising funds to pay for an advertisement in tomorrow's New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. It will read:

“Once in a very great while, a play transcends its form and becomes an experience as real, as imposing, as true, as experience itself. This is ‘Blues for Mister Charlie.’ But when experience is cathartic, for a human being or for a group, it is also threatening, especially to the cult of indifference, which is a pale plague on our cultural life.

“So this play's value is beyond entertainment and beyond the cause with which it is connected. It is a gift of great value to the American heart, out of which comes the only art worth saving. If it can be saved, more than it will be saved.”

Other friends of Mr. Baldwin, including Sammy Davis Jr., Paul Newman and Ossie Davis, are appealing for support. Some are appearing on radio and television. Sound trucks are being sent to all the boroughs in an attempt to bring more people into the theater. Handbills and stickers saying “Save James Baldwin's ‘Blues for Mister Charlie’” are being distributed.

Mr. Baldwin said yesterday he “would do whatever has to be done to tear up the closing notice.” This means that additional financing will have to be raised if this week's gross falls below the break‐even point of $23,000. Two producers, who were not identified by Mr. Baldwin, were willing to take over the attsastion.

“It's not the life of a Broad‐way play I’m fighting for,” Mr. Baldwin laid. “I feel the play has an audience. And we are trying to give it enough time to get that audience.

“Part of that audience has not been to the theater in 20 years. I think it would be interesting if they came back.

“It's not a Negro play. I’m aiming it at everybody. The balcony is always full, but the orchestra isn’t. In our show that's the way it is.

“I haven’t got the carriage trade; they think it's a play about civil rights. The play is about a state of mind and relationship of people to each other, helplessly corrupted and destroyed by this insanity you call color.

“I must work to keep the play alive because I don’t like to go down without a fight, partly because of devotion to the people in the play. I really feel that the exigencies, of the Broadway theater may, for the moment, defeat us, but I do feel the play has an audience.”

Eight previews preceded the premiere on April 23. Since then, the $65,000 production, which has no scenery, has not had a profitable week. The best gross was $20,295 for the week ended May 9. The lowest was $15,415 for last week.

Trade is expected to improve this week because of the threatened closing.

Prices for all performances at the 1,175-seat house range from $2.30 to $4.80, unusually low for Broadway. When the bargain prices were announced, Cheryl Crawford, executive producer of the Actors Studio Theater, said:

“We hope to stimulate the interest of the great potential audience, which, we are convinced, exists for theater that provokes thought as well as provides entertainment.”

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I did some more research and discovered that the fighting to keep it open worked and it ran for another three months, closing on August 29, 1964.

Here is Taubman’s review of the play:

James Baldwin has written a play with fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes and a roar of protest in its throat.

"Blues for Mister Charlie," which stormed into the ANTA Theater last night, is not a tidy play. Its structure is loose, and it makes valid points as if they were clichÈs. But it throbs with fierce energy and passion. It is like a thunderous battle cry.

On a larger scale it resembles "Waiting for Lefty" of three decades ago, when Clifford Odets rallied labor to its rights. "Blues for Mister Charlie" is a summons to arms in this generation's burning cause--the establishment in this country of the Negro's full manhood, with all the perquisites of that simple and lofty station

You need only to open the program to discover what is on Mr. Baldwin's mind. For there he tells you that his play is "dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham."

The title also informs you of Mr. Baldwin's viewpoint. "Mister Charlie" is the phrase the Negro uses for the white man. His play sings the blues for the white man's moral crisis as much as for the Negro's frustration and agony.

There is a moment midway in the play when this point is made with cutting sharpness. The reserved, dignified Rev. Meridian Henry, pastor of the Negro church in a small Southern town, dares to ask the hard question of Parnell, the one decent white man: Have they been friends because Parnell thinks of Meridian as his favorite Uncle Tom? And then the minister warns that truth must be faced--for the white man's sake, not the Negro's.

Using a free form, which weaves in and out the present and the past, Mr. Baldwin is telling the story of Richard Henry, the pastor's son, and of his shooting by a poor, dull- witted redneck. Although Mr. Baldwin has a courtroom for much of his last act, he does not worry about the niceties of legal procedure. Similarly throughout the play he does not bother with routine devices of realism and suspense.

The fundamental forces that lead to such a crime are what concern him. Even more he seeks to express the outraged thoughts and emotions that blazed within seemingly placid Negroes for so many deceptive years. He reaches his most searing moment of preachment at the end of the second act when the Reverend Henry speaks a eulogy over his son's coffin.

Percy Rodriguez reads this speech with consuming intensity. For it is not a lamentation but the wrath of the prophet. "What shall we tell our children?," he cries in a voice of doom. "Learn to walk again like men," he shouts, like a trumpet call. "Like men! Amen!"

In a crucial scene between Richard and Lyle, the redneck, Mr. Baldwin remembers his duty as a dramatist not to take the easy course. Al Freeman Jr. is a Richard who has come back from a stay in the North seething with rebellion. He enters Lyle's store, and challenges Rip Torn's proud, stupid Lyle with an insolence that would infuriate a better white man or even a dark-skinned one. Both men play their roles admirably, and they charge this scene with electricity.

Mr. Baldwin knows how the Negroes think and feel, but his inflexible, Negro-hating Southerners are stereotypes. Southerners may talk and behave as he suggests, but in the theater they are caricatures.

On the other hand, Parnell, played with touching decency and humility by Pat Hingle, has a tender and harrowing recollection of his love for a Negro girl of 17 when he was 18 and of the terrible moment when her mother, a servant in his house, discovered them. This is Mr. Baldwin at the top of his form.

There are memorable dramatic fragments scattered through "Blues for Mister Charlie." Among the best are the vignettes in which key characters speak their thoughts aloud before they testify.

Diana Sands as the girl Richard loved has an impassioned incantation to the fulfillment he has brought her, and she reads it with shattering emotion. Ann Wedgeworth as Lyle's frightened wife, Rosetta Le Noire as Richard's wise, unforgetting grandmother and John McCurry as a Negro who runs a bar perform with touching credibility.

Burgess Meredith's staging of this novelistic script with its constantly shifting episodes and times has admirable fluidity. The changes have the smoothness of a dance. Moods are counterpoint impressively, the white folks meet in Lyle' parlor on a Sunday morning and spew out their sweet poison while in the rear the Negroes surround the coffin and chant somberly "God's walkin' on the water."

Feder's simple open stage is perfectly suited to this treatment, and his lighting is a powerful dramatic agent.

The Actors Studio Theater, which has been stumbling in darkness all season, finally has arrived at something worth doing. Although Mr. Baldwin has not yet mastered all the problems and challenges of the theater, "Blues for Mister Charlie" brings eloquence and conviction to one of the momentous themes of our era.

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Happy birthday, James Baldwin.

(Above: Richard Avedon contact sheet of James Baldwin with his mother, Emma Burdis Baldwin. New York City. 1962.)