A young poet, Nikki Giovanni interviewed an elder statesman of letters, James Baldwin, on television in 1971. Enacted, voiced onstage at the Vineyard Theater, Lessons in Survival: 1971, joins a series of plays produced at this downtown venue that makes use of actual words uttered in real life situations to create a theatrical experience: Tina Slatter’s Is This a Room and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. Deirdre O’Connell won the Best Actress in a Play Tony Award for her performance, after the work transitioned to Broadway. Bringing true words to theater turns out to infuse otherwise merely remarkable events with even greater power. 

Calling Baldwin (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) Jimmy, suggesting an informality that seems unimaginable today for such an austere figure, Giovanni (Crystal Dickinson) first wants to know why he expatriated to Paris for much of his writing life. To anyone’s ears, then and now, the loaded question would trigger a discussion of the largest subject in American history, the subject of slavery, and though 1971 was well after the emancipation of African Americans, the untoward legacy is foremost still in today’s reckoning for both blacks and whites.

 More fascinating is how easily the discourse widens, as the limitations imposed by identification as black—particularly as packaged by whites—define destiny. Using Bing Crosby as an example, they discuss why this skinny white boy who, granted, sings, earns millions when comparably or greater voices never get to exercise their chops, figuring out how to afford a ride on the subway. 

The provocative question extends to the imprint of manhood in black families, the imperative to bring the bacon to the table. In a resonant response, Giovanni exclaims, pleading for black women everywhere, forget the breadwinning, “I just wanted you.” The larger recognition of the ways that men and women are imprisoned in societal roles, makes you forget for the moment that James Baldwin was, of course, gay. And in 1971 America, maybe the way to survival was to keep that true experience under wraps. Well, that’s a whole other conversation, isn’t it?