Isaac Butler joins hosts Sandra Newman and Catherine Nichols to discuss James Baldwin's play "Blues for Mister Charlie" (1964), written to address the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, In this episode we discuss the troubled performance history of the play. We also talk about how Baldwin approached the writing of a play (a genre he generally disliked), and his place in the history of African-American writers grappling with the problem of writing political literature that spoke to both white and Black audiences.
Isaac Butler is the author (with Dan Kois) of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels In America, and also of the forthcoming The Method . He is also a theater director, most recently of The Trump Card, a meditation on the peculiar rise of Donald Trump; he also wrote and directed Real Enemies, a collaboration with the composer Darcy James Argue and the video artist Peter Nigrini, which was named one of the top ten live events of 2015 by the New York Times. He is the co-host of Slate's Working podcast.
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