Performance Space New York Presents a Public Reading of a 1984 Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde

Performance Space New York presents a special First Mondays event: a reading of a never-published-in-full, rousing conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, edited for the occasion by acclaimed poet, essayist, playwright, and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric; The White Card: A Play; Just Us: An American Conversation). Featuring celebrated stage and screen actors Russell G. Jones (Ruined, Father Comes Home From The Wars Parts 1, 2 & 3, Only Murders in the Building, The Americans) and Rosalyn Coleman (To Kill a Mockingbird, Travesties, Radio Golf, The Wedding Band) and directed by Dominique Rider, this one-night-only event takes place in Performance Space's Keith Haring Theater, February 6 at 7pm (doors open at 6:30pm). Co-produced by novelist, playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman and critic and scholar Tavia Nyong'o, this free event kicks off Winter/Spring 2023 programming for Performance Space's boundary-breaking reading series First Mondays, organized by Schulman.

This reading continues to open First Mondays to new interdisciplinary modes, using found text to collide literary reading, debate, and theatrical performance-and bringing two figures who've remained alive in the public imagination back into rare, revelatory conversation with one another. In 1984, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde spoke publicly together for the first time at Hampshire College. An excerpt from this conversation - which turned into an incendiary debate when it approached matters of gender, American society's treatment of Black men and women, and Black men's treatment of Black women - was published in Essence magazine; the transcript never entered the public realm in its totality.

With this reading, Rankine revives a much larger portion of their encounter: a generative meeting of two Black, queer luminaries, in which Lorde probes biases and cracks even in Baldwin's venerated lens, and which opens into a demand for a more intersectional understanding of racial and gendered violence and hierarchy. Lorde emphasizes: "We have to take a new look at the ways in which we fight our joint oppression because if we don't, we're gonna be blowing each other up. We have to begin to redefine the terms of what woman is, what man is, how we relate to each other."

Claudia Rankine says, "In 1984 James Baldwin said, 'No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society.' The chaos that Baldwin refers to is what sparked my interest in his dialogue with Audre Lorde. For me, it's the most relevant conversation I've encountered to date expressing the sensation of powerlessness within the kneejerk push against hopelessness I personally have both witnessed and felt in the last years."

Rankine continues, "Lorde and Baldwin met for the first time on December 1st for dinner where we are told they ate very little, and began their public conversations on December 2, 1983 on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Baldwin held a visiting professorship at the College and Audre Lorde was at the time a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the city of New York. Essence magazine published an edited section of the conversations. I am grateful Sarah brought this two-day conversation to me with the request to edit it down to under an hour. The resulting document is not a play but rather a snapshot of the tensions the two navigated in their public conversation."

Tavia Nyong'o says, "Investigating this historic encounter between two queer Harlem-born luminaries provides a means to re-voice crucial but hidden conversations in the black community. It challenges the theater to again become the space where we rally the intangibles and achieve our country."

Sarah Schulman says, "First Readings is a truly New York series, celebrating how this is a place where you can hear ideas from our most vital literary voices as they're germinating, before they're committed to the published page. New York is a place where ideas are born, and years later you read those same ideas in a bookstore. In Claudia's edit of this conversation, we're hearing two brilliant New York actors interpreting two of America's most important writers, and two people so embedded in the fabric of New York life-Audre Lorde just had a block named after her on 69th, Callen-Lorde Community Health Center is named after her-thinking aloud, as they did in 1984."

First Mondays continues throughout the season with captivating events bringing audiences in contact with works-in-progress from vanguard authors long before they hit the shelves, as well as resonant excerpts from previous writing. In this free series, audiences gather over free drinks as writers give intimate insight into what's on their mind and what's making its way onto their pages. Other readings include: LGBTQ Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer Zaina Arafat (You Exist Too Much), poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multimedia poetry maker Samiya Bashir (Field Theories, Gospel: Poems), and Randa Jarrar, author of the "visceral, unforgettable" (Esquire) memoir Love Is an Ex-Country (March 6); Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love, and the Perfect Meal author Ava Chin (upcoming: Mott Street: A Chinese American Family's Story of Exclusion and Homecoming), arts critic/writer, poet and educator Charles Rice González, and legendary performance artist, writer, poet, and experimental theatre maker C. Carr; and writers and professors Christina Sharpe (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) and Rinaldo Walcott (On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition, The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom).

The season continues a First Mondays tradition: across the program's previous four seasons, it has featured Marathon Readings, durational events that cohere creative communities by bringing people into the same space to share extraordinary texts by avant-garde women authors we have lost. (In the past, they have included bell hooks' Black Looks: Race and Representation, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School). For Spring 2023, First Mondays will feature a Marathon Reading of Urvashi Vaid's Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (April 16).

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