Last year, when director Zachary Baker-Salmon and his cast and crew at Oracle Productions began preparing This House Believes the American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro, their re-creation of a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University in October 1965, they had no idea that on August 9, Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, would be shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. When the original production of This House Believes premiered three weeks later at the Chicago Fringe Festival, it felt less like a historical re-creation than a debate over current events. A year later—after Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and, most recently, the anniversary protests in Ferguson, not to mention the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and the ongoing debate over the Confederate flag—it still does.
But when Clark as Buckley is standing less than ten feet from you, in living color, so secure in his personal superiority as a white man that he dares to challenge Baldwin’s personal testimony (“It is quite impossible in my judgment to deal with the indictments of Mr. Baldwin unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man, unless one is prepared to say to him that the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments you raise”) and then turns the question of American racism into an intellectual exercise, blathering away about how black Americans still live better than 95 percent of the world’s population and that the small increase of black physicians between 1900 and 1960 is not a sign of discrimination in medical schools but that “the Negro’s particular energy is not directed toward that goal”—well, doesn’t that sound a little bit familiar? Haven’t you heard it before, recently even, maybe from someone you know?
Through 9/19: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Mon 8 PM, Oracle Productions 3809 N. Broadway 252-220-0269publicaccesstheatre.org Free
