Study Guide Contents
2
3.)
Production Information
4.)
Letter from Community Engagement and Education Team
5.)
Educational Outreach at Syracuse Stage
6.)
Synopsis
7.)
Meet the Playwright
8.)
Meet the Director
9.)
James Baldwin
11.)
Evolution of LaGuardia Airport
12.)
Harlem, 1940s
13.)
Paris, 1940s
14.)
Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
15.)
People to Know
16.)
Baldwin’s Work and Speeches
17.)
Questions for Discussion
18.)
Elements of Drama
19.)
Elements of Design
20.)
Sources
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Director of Community Engagement & Education Joann Yarrow (315) 443-8603 Associate Director of Education Kate Laissle (315) 442-7755 Group Sales & Student Matinees Tracey White (315) 443-9844 Box Office (315) 443-3275 To Donate To Our Education Programs: Wendy Rhodes Director of Development 315-443-3931 wjneikir@syr.edu Research and text by J.R. Pierce Designed by Kate Laissle
Dear Educator, The bestwayof learning is learning while you’rehaving fun. Live theatre providesthe opportunity for usto connectwith more than just our own story, it allows usto find ourselves in other people’s lives and grow beyond our own boundaries.While t imes are different, westill areexcited to sharewith you new theatrical pieces through pre-recorded means. We’rethe only species on the planet who makes stories. It is the stories that weleave behind that define us. Giving students the power to watch stories and create their own is part of our lasting impact on the world. And the stories we choose to hear and learn from now areevenmore vital. Stories bring ustogether, even when we must stay apart. Stories are our connection to the world and each other. We invite you and your students to engage with the stories wetell as astarting point for you andthem to create their own. Sincerely, Joann Yarrow and Kate Laissle, Community Engagement and Education Team
2020/2021 EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH SPONSORS Syracuse Stage is committed to providing students with rich theatre experiences that explore and examine what it is to be human. Research shows that children who participate in or are exposed to the arts show higher academic achievement, stronger self-esteem, and improved ability to plan and work toward a future goal. Many students in our community have their first taste of live theatre through Syracuse Stage’s outreach programs. Last season more than 15,500 students from across New York State attended or participated in the Bank of America Children’s Tour, the Young Playwrights Festival, Backstory, Young Adult Council, and/or our Student Matinee Program. We gratefully acknowledge the corporations and foundations who support our commitment to in-depth arts education for our community.
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
| 3
Educational Outreach at Syracuse Stage
Syracuse Stage iscommitted to providing students with rich theatre experiencesthat connect to and reveal what it is to be human.
4
|
Education Advocacy Board
YAC: Young Adult Council
The Education Advocacy Board is a group of teachers from the Central New York region who meet four times a year with Syracuse Stage to share their ideas and concerns about current arts education issues. Members work with Education staff at Syracuse Stage to help tailor programming to best fit the educators and students served. This past year topics discussed have included creating more useful study guides, exchanging views on future programming, working towards more effectively engaging young people in the arts, as well as discussing the influence of the Common Core on arts education.
THE YOUNG ADULT COUNCIL (YAC) at Syracuse Stage seeks to give teens a voice in the programming designed for them while exploring how theatre impacts their lives. The program focuses on peer led discussion and events in addition to advocating for theatre and arts participation to fellow students. The Syracuse Stage YAC is a group of high school students from the Central New York area that meets monthly to create and implement pre-show events that will help inspire the next generation of theatregoers. YAC members can also take advantage of opportunities to learn from professional theatre artists at Syracuse Stage and through workshops, internships, and shadow programs.
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Educational Outreach at Syracuse Stage Children’s Tour
Backstory
Each fall, the Bank of America Children’s Tour brings high-energy, interactive, and culturally diverse performances to elementary school audiences. Each performance is fully staged with scenery, costumes, and sound. This year you will be able to experience the performance as a pre-recorded production. Performances include a talkback with the actors and our helpful study guide for further classroom exploration. Pre- or post-show sessions with our talented teaching artists can be arranged upon request.
Each winter, the Backstory program brings history to life as professional actors portray historical figures in classrooms and other venues. Previous presentations have included historical figures such as Anne Frank; Ace, a Tuskegee Airman; and Annie Easley, a human computer for NASA.
Virtual Syracuse Stage Education Classes and Workshops
Young Playwrights Festival
Our program features engaging content for theatre-lovers of all ages. Delve deep into the craft through private classes, group acting courses, live virtual classroom experiences, and master classes on a variety of subjects. Please note that due to COVID-19, all of our programming is virtual. New class workshops for all ages available here: https://syracusestage.coursestorm.com
Each spring, Syracuse Stage invites Central New York high school students to write original ten-minute plays and other performance pieces for entry in our annual Young Playwrights Festival contest. Our panel of theatrical and literary professionals evaluates each student’s play. Semifinalists are invited to a writing workshop at Syracuse Stage where their plays will be read and critiqued. Finalists will see their plays performed as staged reading by Syracuse University Department of Drama students at the annual Young Playwrights Festival. The festival is free and open to the public.
Summer Youth Theatre Experience Come and play with professional teaching artists of Syracuse Stage as we dive into the magical world of creativity and performance. This year we completed a wonderful 2-week summer virtual theatre program with 32 students, ages 11-14, from 4 different states.
Our very successful 2020 season was presented as a virtual four night experience on our social media platforms. Having the opporunity to showcase our top 16 virtually helped reach a much larger audience in a fun, new, and safe capacity.
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
| 5
Citizen James Meet a 24-year-old James Baldwin at LaGuardia Airport. Young James is an unknown aspiring “Negro” writer whose first novel hasyet to bepublished. He awaitshis flight, having just left his family with the news of his decisionto flee America for refuge in Paris. He speaks no French. He has a one-way ticket and $40in his pocket. Witness James Baldwin as he decides he must do something to savehimself from the violent reality of racist America in 1948,a decision that sets him on the path to becoming a brilliant, powerful, andprophetic voiceof the Civil Rights eraand beyond.
Photograph by Richard Avedon
6
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Meet the Playwright Kyle Bass is the author of Possessing Harriet, which received its world premiere at Syracuse Stage, was subsequently produced at Franklin Stage Company, and will be produced next year at the East Lynn Theater Company in New Jersey. His new play salt/city/blues will have its world premiere in Syracuse Stage’s 21/22 season. Script consultant on Thoughts of a Colored Man, Kyle is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (for fiction in 1998 and playwriting in 2010), a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, and Pushcart Prize nominee. His other full-length plays include Tender Rain, Baldwin vs. Buckley: The Faith of Our Fathers, Bleecker Street, and Separated, a piece of documentary theatre about the student military veterans at Syracuse University, which was presented at Syracuse Stage and at the Paley Center in New York, directed by Robert Hupp. Kyle is the co-author (with Ping Chong) of Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo, which had its world premiere at Syracuse Stage and was subsequently produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York, and the libretto for an opera based on the life and music of legendary folk singer and guitarist Libba Cotten, commissioned by the Society for New Music. As dramaturg, Kyle worked with acclaimed visual artist Carrie Mae Weems on her theatre piece Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, which had its world premiere at the 2016 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, subsequently produced at Yale Rep and the Kennedy Center. As a screenwriter, Kyle is the co-author of the original screenplay for the film Day of Days (Broad Green Pictures, 2017), which stars awardwinning veteran actor Tom Skerritt. His plays and other writings have appeared in the journals Callaloo, Folio, and Stone Canoe, among others, and in the essay anthology Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk about Writing. Kyle has taught in the Colgate Writers Conference, has been guest lecturer in playwriting at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, was faculty in the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Goddard College from 2006 to 2018, and from 2005 to 2018 he taught playwriting in Syracuse University’s Department of Drama and theatre courses in the Department of African American Studies, and was the 2019/20 Susan P. Stroman Visiting Playwright at the University of Delaware. Kyle is currently full-time faculty as assistant professor in the Department of Theater at Colgate University where he previously served as the Burke Endowed Chair for Regional Studies. Kyle holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from Goddard College, is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and is represented by The Barbara Hogenson Agency.
photograph by BrennaMerritt
Kyle Bass
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
| 7
Meet the Director
photograph by BrennaMerritt
Joann Yarrow
8
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Joann Maria Yarrow is the Director of Community Engagement and Education at Syracuse Stage. She began her work and training with Double Edge Theatre in Boston and Odin Teatret in Denmark. Joann cofounded A Laboratory for Actor Training with Vernice Miller (currently at John Jay College) while working with Richard Schechner’s company East Coast Artists. She spent three years with Broadway director, Harold Prince on the productions of Parade, Whistle down the Wind, Candide, Show Boat, Kiss of the Spiderwoman and Phantom of the Opera. With over 30 years of experience, she has directed and produced productions in Denmark, London, Madrid, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. For twelve years, she was the Artistic Director of Teatro Prometeo, a Spanish-language theatre repertory and conservatory in Miami where she worked on more than 80 productions and translated, adapted, and commissioned new works that have toured nationally and internationally. There she translated Oliver Mayer’s Blade to the Heat and developed workshops and readings for a Spanish translation of his play Dark Matters (winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Initiative Award for Plays about Science). She is a member of the Latinx Theater Commons and the Director’s Lab West in Los Angeles. Joann received her BFA from Boston University and an MFA in Directing from UC Irvine. She is a featured director in the book “The Art and Practice of Directing in Latin America: Central America and United States.” She has recently directed Stephanie Leary’s Commanding Space: The Rise of Annie Easley and the Centaur Rocket, a Syracuse Stage Backstory production.
James Baldwin
“
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
”
James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, the upper Manhattan neighborhood in New York City, to a single mother. At the age of three, his mother, Emma Jones, married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister. Despite having a strained relationship with his father, Baldwin followed in the elder Baldwin’s footsteps, working as a preacher in a small revivalist church between the ages of 14 and 16. Later in life, Baldwin would write about and draw upon this time in his life in the first of his novels, the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as in his play The Amen Corner (1965), about a woman evangelist. Growing up, Baldwin developed a passion for reading and a gift for writing. Working on his high school’s magazine--alongside future award-winning photographer Richard Avedon--Baldwin began publishing poems, short stories, and plays. After graduating from high school in 1942, Baldwin put college plans on hold while he helped support his family, which had grown to include seven younger half-siblings. During this time, he took a series of illpaid jobs, including laying railroad tracks in New Jersey for the Army, while also engaging in self-study and a literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village. In 1943, Baldwin lost his father the same day (July 29) his eighth sibling was born. He moved to Greenwich Village soon after. Baldwin devoted himself to writing a novel, befriending writer Richard Wright, and eventually landing a fellowship in 1945 that covered his expenses. Baldwin’s essays and short stories began being published in national periodicals like The Nation, Partisan Review, and Commentary. Following the receipt of another fellowship, Baldwin moved to Paris, France, in 1948, where he lived for eight years. This also marked the beginning of Baldwin’s life as a “transatlantic commuter”--from 1969, Baldwin lived alternatively in the south of France, New York, and New England. Photo courtesy of blackpast.org
The shift to Paris in 1948 was also a move that Baldwin would later note gave him clarity as he looked back across the ocean and dealt with the realSYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
| 9
James Baldwin ity that came with being the grandson of a slave. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, saw Baldwin examine his life growing up in Harlem, issues with his father, as well as his religion. Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship the next year, leading to the publication of his second novel Giovanni’s Room in 1956, a groundbreaking novel for its complex depiction of homosexuality. Between these two novels, Baldwin also published a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955). Baldwin, who was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both men and women, would often explore topics that were controversial for his time, including homosexuality and interracial relationships. In 1957, Baldwin returned to the United States and became active in the civil rights movement. Themes around race were central to works like his book of essays Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and his novel Another Country (1962).
King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. (Baldwin’s book Nothing Personal, a collaboration with Avedon published in 1964, was a tribute to Evers.) Critics point to Baldwin’s 1972 collection of essays, No Name in the Street, as a turning point in Baldwin’s work, where he took a more strident tone than his earlier works. In the final years of his life, Baldwin was teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College, sharing his views and experiences as an observer of race and American culture. Baldwin died at his home in St. Paul de Vence, France, on Dec. 1, 1987.
In 1962, The New Yorker gave almost an entire issue of the magazine over to Baldwin’s article on the Black Muslim separatist movement and the civil rights movement. That article, “Letters from a Region of My Mind,” as well as another essay in The Progressive, “My Dungeon Shook,” were then combined and published in 1963 under the title The Fire Next Time. This book, intended to educate white Americans on what it meant to be Black, would go on to be considered one of the most influential books about race relations in the ‘60s. The same year The Fire Next Time was published, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine. By diving into his own life, Baldwin gave readers an unflinching look at the experience of Black Americans. Baldwin’s writing resulted in him becoming one of the leading voices in the civil rights movement. During this time, Baldwin was also writing for the stage, beginning with The Amen Corner, which was first published in 1954 before opening on Broadway in 1965. A year earlier, his play Blues for Mister Charlie, which was loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till, also premiered on Broadway. Baldwin continued writing until he died in 1987, though his later works did not achieve the popular or critical success of his earlier work. By the ‘70s, Baldwin had witnessed the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther
10
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Baldwin’s house in St. Paul De Vence asof 2009
Origins of LaGuardia Airport Located in the New York City borough of Queens, LaGuardia Airport combines with JFK International and Newark Liberty International airports to create the largest airport system in the country and the largest total flight operations in the world. Prior to becoming an airport, the location of LaGuardia Airport used to be the site of the Gala Amusement Park, run by the Steinway family (the same Steinway family that founded the Steinway and Sons piano company). In 1929, the park was torn down and converted into a private airport called the Glenn H. Curtiss Airport after the American aviation pioneer. The airport was renamed in 1935 and became the North Beach Airport.
LaGuardiaAirport, 1939
Shortly thereafter, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia led an effort to turn North Beach Airport into an airport for commercial flights. At the time, Newark Commercial Airport was the only commercial airport for the area. Over $20 million was invested in the project, which had its share of critics; however, in December 1939, the New York Municipal Airport (alternatively being known as LaGuardia Field) opened. The airport captured the public’s attention and capitalized on their fascination with air travel. Two years into the new airport being open, income from parking and non-travel (with people coming to watch airlines taking off and landing) surpassed $900,000 a year, making the airport a financial success. This also spelled doom for nearby airports like Jackson Heights’ Holmes Airport, that couldn’t keep up and were unable to stop the expansion of the larger airport. During World War II, the airport was used as a training facility for aviation technicians and as a logistics field. It wasn’t until June 1947 that the modern name of LaGuardia Airport was adopted. The change followed an agreement to switch control of the airfield to the Port of New York Authority. The airport’s namesake died from pancreatic cancer three months after the agreement was finalized. The airport’s reveune in 2019 reached over $429 million and served 22 million passengers
SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 11
Harlem: 1940s As the United States emerged from World War II, New York City found itself in a drastically different place than it was in before the war. Commercial activity brought on by the war reignited the city’s economy, lifting the city out of the Depression and into a period of prosperity. In fact, New York had become the world’s largest manufacturing center by the late 1940s, it was the world’s biggest port, and it was the world’s financial capital. Unfortunately, continued discrimination meant that many Black New Yorkers did not benefit as many were denied factory positions created by the war. While many Black Americans went off to fight for democracy overseas, injustices in America remained. Still, the hope for these wartime jobs as America recovered from the Great Depression led to the second great migration, a period between 1940 and 1970 that saw more than 5 million African Americans leave the South and move to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. In the first two decades, half a million Black southerners migrated to New York State alone. Of the approximately 485,000 Black New Yorkers in the early 1940s, 300,000 lived in Harlem. Segregation, a housing shortage, and a struggling working class led to crowded conditions in the city. Tensions boiled over in Harlem, resulting in a series of riots. The first, which took place in 1935 during the Great Depression, happened after a boy was accused of stealing and subsequently killed by the police. Three men died and 600 stores were looted. The summer of 1943 saw eruptions of racial disturbances in 47 cities across the country, including in Detroit; Mobile, Alabama; and Beaumont, Texas. In August of that year, a soldier intervened as a white police officer tried to arrest and struck a Black woman who was involved in an argument over an unsatisfactory hotel room. The soldier was shot by the police officer. For two days, angry residents poured into the streets, despite being faced with a force of 16,100 city police, military police, civil patrolmen, state guardsmen, and civilian volunteers brought in to end the violence. By the end, six people died, hundreds were injured, 500 were arrested, and more than 1,400 businesses were destroyed, damaged, or looted.
“ 12
|
The 1940s also saw Harlem enter into the political infrastructure. In 1941 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected to the New York City Council. Three years later, after a congressional district was placed in Harlem, Powell became the first African-American from New York elected to congress, where he served until 1971. Meanwhile, post-war New York was experiencing a cultural TheLenox and Fifth AvenueTenantsLeaguedemandsfair housing conditions boom, with creators and tenant rights, 1949 like Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins leading the way. In the Harlem nightclub, musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were pioneering a new style of jazz called “Be-bop.” This period also saw dozens of modern artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, and Wassily Kandinsky, move to New York amid the rise of fascism in Europe and the conflict that followed. In addition to their own work, these artists influenced a younger generation of artists, like Jackson Pollock. Where Paris had previously reigned as the center of the art world, post-World War II marked a shift of the art and culture world to the island of Manhattan.
”
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. - James Baldwin SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
Paris: 1940s Like many countries in Europe, France in the 1940s was marred by World War II. Paris started mobilizing for war in September 1939, and France was attacked by the Germans eight months later. The French army was defeated quickly, with the French government leaving Paris on June 10 and the Germans occupying the city on June 14. The occupation lasted until August 1944, when the city was liberated by French and American troops. After the war, Parisians wound up needing to do much more rebuilding mentally than physically. Though the Nazis had been comparatively less destructive to Paris than they had been elsewhere in the country, Paris also had to work to overcome the shame of the four year occupation and the country’s history of collaboration with Germany.
1944 to 1949, the French conducted “épuration légale” (“legal purge”), a series of trials that saw over 300,000 cases investigated. While the total number of executions that took place before and after the liberation are unknown, estimates range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.
However, despite the wartime backdrop, the Paris that Baldwin moved to in 1948 was one of revitalization as a new generation of artists, writers, musicians, and actors gathered in the cafes and nightclubs of the Left Bank to bring French culture back. Philosophers and writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus commanded the attention of the world with existentialism. Sartre and Camus would both go on to win Nobel Prizes (with Sartre refusing his out of fear it would limit the impact of his writing), though exisThe result was a wave of violent purges called “l’épuration sauvage,” or “wild purification,” where Parisians turned on each other, targeting anyone suspected tentialism’s appeal faded over the next decade as economic recovery set in and the dark postwar mood lifted. It wasn’t long before Paris regained its position as of colluding with the Germans. Because these purges happened before the one of the world’s leaders for intellectual creativity. establishment of the French Provisional Government’s authority, these executions, public humiliations, and assaults lacked any institutional justice. From
Baldwin in Paris,1949 SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 13
Baldwin & The Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement mainly took place during the 1950s and ‘60s as Black Americans, almost 100 years after the abolition of slavery, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality in the face of continued discrimination. Even after many Black men and women served in World War II, including the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Black veterans returned home to be met with prejudice. The 1950s saw historical moments like the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling making segregation in public schools illegal (1954), Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus (1955), and the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first major civil rights legislation since the end of the Civil War. During the early 1960s, after Baldwin had returned to the United States from France, Baldwin traveled throughout the South. During his travels, he found himself aligning with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). CORE was founded in 1942 by an interracial group of students in Chicago and members of the group pioneered the use of nonviolent action in the civil rights movement, including providing advice and support to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott. King worked with CORE into the mid1960s, when CORE adopted Black separatist policies and abandoned its dedication to nonviolence. When Baldwin went on to conduct a lecture tour of the South for CORE, Baldwin discussed his own racial ideology, one that positioned him between the “muscular approach” of Malcolm X and the nonviolent ideals of King. Additionally, Baldwin stood alongside Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, and other civil rights figures in a meeting with then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy where they discussed the moral implications of the civil rights movement. The meeting left most attendees feeling “devastated,” though the meeting proved instru14
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
mental in showing civil rights as a moral issue rather than a political one. Baldwin also made an appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Despite criticisms for his pacifist ideals, Baldwin was a crucial figure in the civil rights movement. As the ‘60s continued, the movement faced tragedy as Malcolm X and King were assassinated. In 1965, the same year Malcolm X was assassinated, a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, turned violent as protesters were beaten and tear gassed by police sent by the Alabama governor George C. Wallace. The ‘60s also saw the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968), the final legislation enacted during the Civil Rights era.
The1963 Civil RightsMarch
People to Know Bessie Smith - From humble beginnings, Bessie Smith emerged as one of the most renowned and recognizable singers from the Jazz Age. Bessie Smith sang for and about her audiences, with many of her songs detailing the struggles that her community faced under crude discrimination laws. Her most popular songs include, “St. Louis Blues,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” and “Down Hearted Blues.” Her work went on to inspire dozens of female artists throughout the 20th century, and continues to influence popular music today.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Countee Cullen - Born in Kentucky in 1903, Countee Cullen grew up to be an accomplished poet, and a strong voice at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance. Some of his more popular publications include, “For A Lady I Know” and “A Brown Girl Dead.” Despite his budding career as a poet, Cullen took on a brief position at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he served as a French teacher. This is where he would go on to meet his future student, and soon-to-be mentee, James Baldwin. He died in 1946, having published dozens of works of poetry and establishing himself as a powerful force throughout the pre-civil rights movement era.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Beauford Delaney made his mark on the world as a painter during the Harlem Renaissance. As a Modernist artist, Delaney focused much of his work on the lively scenes around him, in addition to painting the portraits of many different African American figures in the early 20th century, including the likes of W.E.B Du Bois, Duke Ellington, and James Baldwin. Although he shifted to a more abstract approach as time went on, his earlier paintings still stand today as significant contributions to the artistic work done throughout the Harlem Renaissance. Beauford Delaney, 1950
Richard Wright - Most famously known for his 1940 novel, Native Son, author Richard Wright sought to write about the African American experience and explicate what life was like for the Black community prior to the civil rights movement. Wright's work depicted life in America for Black people in a visceral and real way that had never been put on the page before. Having established himself as a strong voice within the African American community, many young Black writers used him as inspiration, including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Chester Himes. To this day, his writing is attributed to having helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten
SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 15
Baldwin’s Work & Speeches Novels • • • • • •
1953. Go Tell It on the Mountain 1956. Giovanni’s Room 1962. Another Country 1968. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone 1974. If Beale Street Could Talk 1979. Just Above My Head
Essays and Short Stories •
1953. “Stranger in the Village.” Harper’s Magazine. 1954. “Gide as Husband and Homosexual.” The New Leader. 1956. “Faulkner and Desegregation.” Partisan Review. 1957. “Sonny’s Blues.” Partisan Review. 1957. “Princes and Powers.” Encounter. 1958. “The Hard Kind of Courage.” Harper’s Magazine. 1959. “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” The New York Times Book Review. 1959. “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South.” Partisan Review. 1960. “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem.” Esquire. 1960. “The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman.” Esquire. 1961. “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood.” New York Times Magazine. 1961. “The Survival of Richard Wright.” Reporter. 1961. “Richard Wright.” Encounter. 1962. “Letter from a Region of My Mind.” The New Yorker. 1962. “My Dungeon Shook.” The Progressive. 1963. “A Talk to Teachers”
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
16
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
•
•
1967. “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” New York Times Magazine. 1976. The Devil Finds Work — a book-length essay published by Dial Press.
•
Posthumous collections •
Collections • • • • • • • • •
1955. Notes of a Native Son 1961. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son 1963. The Fire Next Time 1965. Going to Meet the Man 1972. No Name in the Street 1983. Jimmy’s Blues 1985. The Evidence of Things Not Seen 1985. The Price of the Ticket 2010. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.
2004. Native Sons, with Sol Stein
•
• •
•
1998. Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Going to Meet the Man, edited by Toni Morrison. 1998. Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work, Other Essays, edited by Toni Morrison. 2014. Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. 2015. Later Novels: Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, edited by Darryl Pinckney. 2016. Baldwin for Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for an Age of Sorrow and Struggle, with notes and introduction by Rich Blint.
Plays and Audio
Links to Speeches
• • • • •
•
• •
• • •
1954. The Amen Corner (play) 1964. Blues for Mister Charlie (play) 1990. A Lover’s Question (album) Collaborative works 1964. Nothing Personal, with Richard Avedon (photography) 1971. A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead 1971. A Passenger from the West, narrative with Baldwin conversations, by Nabile Farès; appended with a long-lost interview. 1972. One Day When I Was Lost (orig.: A. Haley) 1973. A Dialogue, with Nikki Giovanni 1976. Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood, with Yoran Cazac
• • • • • •
https://www.c-span.org/video/?170651-1/jamesbaldwin-speech https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NUBh9GqFU3A https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EMYgOfcgMaI https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QWF2Wjie7Vs https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3y6xwH88kpg https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jNpitdJSXWY
•
After viewing Citizen James, take a moment to record your initial impressions about the interpretation of James Baldwin seen in this show versus any preconceived notions of the man. Where were the similarities and differences?If this is your first intorduction to James Baldwin, what are your first impressions? In small groups, discuss your different perspectives. Why do you think you learned about James Baldwin when you did?How does his story differ from more well known civil rights figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr.
•
The play makes many connections to today and how James Baldwin’s words and thoughts were often prophetic. Read the following quotes and discuss their relevance to today’s world: • What is it you want me to reconcile myself to?...You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’? • I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. • I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do. • To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time • If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not. • The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. • I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
•
Read the following - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-obit.html#:~:text=James%20 Baldwin%2C%20whose%20passionate%2C%20intensely,He%20was%2063%20years%20old. In Citizen James, we meet a 24-year-old James Baldwin. The above is his obituary and includes quotes from him reflecting on his younger life. What hints do you see of who he is to become throughout the show. What parts of Baldwin’s passion and knowledge where there from the beginning? Reflect on your own life and big decisions you’ve made or will make. How do you think these decisions will continue to echo?
•
Use the following PBSresource for in depth biographical information, further lesson plans, and videos of James Baldwin - https://www.pbs. org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-about-the-author/59/
SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 17
elements of drama PLOT
What is the story line?What happened before the play started?What do the characters want?What do they do to achieve their goals?What do they stand to gain/lose? THEME
What ideas are wrestled with in the play?What questions does the play pose? Does it present an opinion? CHARACTER
Who are the people in the story?What are their relationships?Why do they do what they do? How does age/status/etc. effect them? LANGUAGE
What do the characters say? How do they say it? When do they say it? MUSIC
How do music and sound help to tell the story? SPECTACLE
Any piece of theatre comprises multiple art forms. As you explore this production with your students, examine the use of:
WRITING VISUAL ART/DESIGN MUSIC/SOUND DANCE/MOVEMENT
ACTIVITY At its core, drama is about characters working toward goals and overcoming obstacles. Ask students to use their bodies and voices to create characters who are: very old, very young, very strong, very weak, very tired, very energetic, very cold, very warm. Have their characters interact with others. Give them an objective to fulfill despite environmental obstacles. Later, recap by asking how these obstacles affected their characters and the pursuit of their objectives.
How do the elements come together to create the whole performance?
Other Elements: Conflict/Resolution, Action, Improvisation, Non-verbal Communication, Staging, Humor, Realism and other styles, Metaphor, Language, Tone, Pat-tern and Repetition, Emotion, Point of view.
18
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
I N Q U I RY How are each of these art forms used in this production?Why are they used? How do they help to tell the story?
elements of design LINE can have length, width, texture, direction,
and curve.There are five basic varieties: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, curved, and zig-zag. SHAPE is two-dimensional and encloses space.
It can be geometric (e.g. squares and circles), man-made, or free-form. FORM is three-dimensional. It encloses space
and fills space. It can be geometric (e.g. cubes and cylinders), man-made, or free-form. COLOR has three basic properties:
HUE is the name of the color (e.g. red, blue, green), INTENSITY is the strength of the color (bright or dull),VALUE is the range of lightness to darkness.
refers to the “feel” of an object’s surface. It can be smooth, rough, soft, etc. Textures may be ACTUAL (able to be felt) or IMPLIED (suggested visually through the artist’s technique). TEXTURE
SPACE is defined and determined by
shapes and forms. Positive space is enclosed by shapes and forms, while negative space exists around them.
SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 19
Sources “1940-1959.” BlackNYers, Schomburg Center for Researchin Black Culture NYPL, blacknewyorkers-nypl.org/education/.
World, 30 May 2018,www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2018/05/howpostwar-paris-became-intellectual-capital-world.
“Adam Clayton Powell Jr.”Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Clayton_Powell_Jr.
“Infrastructure.” NYCdata:LaGuardiaAirport (LGA), www.baruch.cuny.edu/ nycdata/infrastructure/airport_laguardia.html.
“The Amen Corner.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Nov. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amen_Corner.
“JamesBaldwin.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 23 June2020, www.biography.com/writer/james-baldwin.
Backes,Aaron D., et al. “The History Of New York's LaGuardiaAirport.” ClassicNewYorkHistory.com, 16 Jan.2020,classicnewyorkhistory.com/the-historyof-new-yorks-laguardia-airport/.
“JamesBaldwin.” EncyclopædiaBritannica, EncyclopædiaBritannica, Inc., 27 Nov. 2020,www.britannica.com/biography/James-Baldwin.
“Congressof Racial Equality (CORE).” TheMartin Luther King, Jr.,Research and Education Institute, 4 Aug. 2020,kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/ congress-racial-equality-core. “The Cultural Scene.”EncyclopædiaBritannica, EncyclopædiaBritannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/place/France/The-cultural-scene. “The Fire Next Time.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fire_Next_Time. “France since 1940.”EncyclopædiaBritannica, EncyclopædiaBritannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/place/France/France-since-1940.
“JamesBaldwin.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Jan.2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin. “New York After WWII.” PBS,Public BroadcastingService,www.pbs.org/ wgbh/americanexperience/features/newyork-postwar/. “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964.”NobelPrize.org, www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/1964/sartre/documentary/.
“History of Harlem.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Dec.2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harlem.
Yardley, Jonathan.“A History of Parisduring Nazi Occupation.” TheWashington Post,WP Company, 29Aug. 2014,www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ahistory-of-paris-during-nazi-occupation/2014/08/29/fce9e112-222c-11e4958c-268a320a60ce_story.html.
“History of Paris(1946–2000).”Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19Nov. 2020,en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Paris_%281946%E2%80%932000%29.
“Épuration Légale.”Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89puration_l%C3%A9gale.
History.com Editors. “Civil RightsMovement.”History.com, A&E Television Networks,27 Oct. 2009,www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rightsmovement. Hussey,Andrew. How Postwar Paris Becamethe Intellectual Capital of the
20
“JamesBaldwin.” JamesBaldwin: African American Writer, www.myblackhistory.net/James_Baldwin.htm.
|
SYRACUSESTAGE EDUCATION
SYRACUSE STAGE EDUCATION
| 21
