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 ten From Istanbul to St. Paul-de-Vence Around James Baldwin’s The Welcome Table magdalena j. zaborowska In an interview with Ali Poyrazog(lu published in Turkey in 1969, James Baldwin stated, “It is very dif‹cult to talk about American theatre. There is no such thing as an American theatrical tradition.”1 Well aware of what had been available to theatergoers and play readers in his home country, Baldwin expressed this view having just directed a play by the Canadian playwright John Herbert, entitled Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1964), for the Gülriz Sururi and Engin Cezzar Theater in Istanbul.2 Düşenin Dostu, as its translation read in Turkish, takes on the risky subjects of prison masculinity, homosexuality , homosocial bonds, and violence between men.3 In the 1969 interview, which was published in the theater company’s newsletter, Tiyatro , Baldwin discusses his dif‹cult role as the director of Düşenin Dostu, looks back toward the United States, and voices “hopes for the future of the American theater.” He mentions the “very noble projects” taking place off Broadway and explains that he is waiting for the mainstream theater of the United States to embrace and acknowledge all members of American society, including people of color.4 Both the interview and Baldwin’s longterm involvement in theater in Turkey and in the United States demonstrate his realization not only that any future transformation of the theater needed to take account of issues of race, gender and sexuality, but that, at the same time, it was necessary to think beyond the orthodoxy binaries. Baldwin’s third play and last completed work, The Welcome Table (1987), 188 can be read as his response to the traditional American theater whose challenges he had in mind while talking with Poyrazog(lu in 1969. Originally conceived in Turkey around 1967, The Welcome Table was ‹nally completed in draft form only two decades later, in the writer’s house in St. Paul-deVence in southern France. Baldwin wrote its earliest parts soon after the opening of Düşenin Dostu; early work on The Welcome Table coincided as well with completion of No Name in the Street (1972), a two-essay volume about his female ancestry, the Civil Rights Movement, black masculinity, and his visits to the American South and Germany, which was also written in Turkey. Indeed, essays that comprised No Name in the Street anticipated some of the ideas, and even phrases, that were later echoed in The Welcome Table. Many word-for-word sentences that eventually found their way into his published works ‹rst appeared in his letters to friends and family, especially those to Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor and director who was Baldwin ’s close friend during 1956–81 and who had ‹rst invited him to Turkey.5 Largely unexamined by scholars, critics, and readers, Baldwin’s authorial exile in the East, which consisted of extended visits devoted to proli‹c writing between 1961 and 1971, was key to the completion of some of his most important—and arguably his most American—works: from his third novel Another Country (1962) and the two-essay volume The Fire Next Time (1963); through the play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), the short story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), the fourth novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968); to his unrealized scenario on the life of Malcolm X, One Day When I Was Lost (1972), and the fourth collection of essays, No Name in the Street (1972), not to mention numerous occasional essays.6 Arising from, and closing, this prodigious output, The Welcome Table can be seen as a work that represents Baldwin’s Turkish decade, most clearly in its genesis in Istanbul but also in his preoccupation with new literary forms and themes that he ‹rst embraced while living in Turkey and that he was to develop further in his later works written in France. As well as experimenting with the forms of the novel and the essay in the 1960s and 1970s, Baldwin saw his third play as exploring a new kind of theater. It was about “exiles and alienation’”;7 like No Name in the Street, it came out of his need to witness history, but also to escape it, or “get away from . . . the horror of our time . . . to ventilate, to look at the horror from some other point of view.”8 Unlike his two earlier plays that were...

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