Debate: Baldwin vs Buckley Tickets - London
Following a successful series of critically acclaimed runs in Chicago, New York City, London, and Los Angeles, the American Vicarious’s radically staged production of the historic Cambridge Union Debate between William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin is reimagined and acted out in London at Wilton’s Music Hall.
The debate in question, “Is The American Dream At The Expense Of The American Negro?”
This topic was the subject of a fiery confrontation at the Cambridge Union on February 18, 1965, that took place in front of a packed crowd who crammed themselves in to witness the historic and televised debate between James Baldwin — the primary literary voice of the U.S. civil rights movement — and William F. Buckley Jr., the most prominent conservative intellectual in America.
The stage was set up for an extraordinary confrontation: Baldwin’s rallying call for a moral revolution in U.S. race relations against Buckley’s robust defence of the American establishment. Their exchanges exposed the deep divisions that were rooted at the very heart of American democracy — divisions that continue to shape our present.
American Vicarious now return the words of Buckley and Baldwin into public conversation by restaging this historic debate, where sixty years later, the arguments still pierce, the stakes are undiminished, and there are questions that still demand our attention.