Few writers turn out their career-defining work on the first try. But that was James Baldwin with his 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The semi-autobiographical book, about a day in the life of a Black teen whose stepfather is a minister of a Harlem Pentecostal church, was received by critics with glowing praise. Today it remains lauded as one of the great novels of modern American literature.
Baldwin’s second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was quite a different story — literally and figuratively. A thematic departure from its predecessor, the novel was about two gay white men: David, a closeted American man, who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, in Paris. In the book Baldwin unpacks motifs related to masculinity and queerness, classism and American exceptionalism all through sparkling dialogue and robust, deeply ruminative prose.
Though now considered a significant work of the 20th-century queer literary canon, “Giovanni’s Room” didn’t share the immediate adoration and popularity of its predecessor. In fact, it was rejected by his publisher, Knopf, when first submitted. “We think that publishing this book, not because of its subject but because of its failure, will set the wrong kind of cachet on your writing and estrange many of your readers,” the editor Henry Carlisle wrote in a letter to Baldwin in 1955. But Dial Press published the book in 1958, and almost immediately Baldwin had further plans for it.
First there was the stage. In 1958 he produced a dramatization of “Giovanni’s Room” for the Actors Studio starring the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar as Giovanni. The play didn’t make it to Broadway, but Baldwin intended to return “Giovanni’s Room” to the stage, or even adapt it to film. He insisted on creative control, which hindered some potential efforts from other artists.
In the late ’70s he collaborated with the South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn on a screenplay, with hopes of big names like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando taking part. The project never got off the ground, though; Baldwin’s literary agent requested $100,000 for the book option, which the writer couldn’t afford.
For all the logistical hurdles, there are also the obvious artistic ones that come with a translation of a literary work to a visual medium. “I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room,” David says in one section of the book. And yet readers are presented with an image of the room at the heart of the book: small, with two windows whose glass is clouded with white cleaning polish; a lonely wall stripped of wallpaper of a stately couple walking among roses; a mess of soiled laundry, boxes and old newspapers. But the room is as much a metaphorical space as it is a physical location, marked by the feelings and experiences of the two lovers. So how do you replicate such a setting, so viscerally described, from the disordered chaos of the floors and walls to the musk of spilled red wine?
A WIDE BALCONY, flanked on both sides by stairs, overlooks the thrust stage at the Quintessence Theater in Philadelphia. The tops of the Parisian buildings with their lit windows in the backdrop seem to peer over at the stage like the faces of additional audience members. The remaining space on the stage is bare as a prison cell. Projections show windows that aren’t white-shaded, but instead plastered over with newspaper, and flashes of damask-pattern wallpaper. The bed isn’t much more than a rectangular wooden crate topped with a flat cushion. Matching wooden benches sit demurely at the ends of the bed.
This is Giovanni’s room, as captured in Quintessence’s world premiere adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, running through early July. “When I thought of the room, I thought it can be a magical place where time can shift,” Paul Oakley Stovall, the director and co-adaptor of the production, said in an interview. “So I began structuring it that way. So that’s how I got in, and we never looked back.”
The production’s earliest origins are from 2007, when the actor Benjamin Sprunger started working the novel — which he first discovered as a college student through an AOL chat room for gay men — into a kind of presentational draft of a play. For years Sprunger actively pursued the rights for the work, speaking to Baldwin’s publisher, estate and then even to Baldwin’s younger sister; the estate finally granted its permission for the adaptation, pending script approval. Sprunger, who was completely new to playwriting, collaborated on the script with Stovall, a longtime peer and fellow associate of About Face Theater, an L.G.B.T.Q. theater in Chicago with a tradition of doing literary adaptations for the stage.
“I have to confess, when Ben approached me, I was like, ‘Nope, nobody touches King James. No, no, no, we don’t touch the Black king,’” Stovall said. “And my little Black gay self was like, ‘I’m going to leave this; it’s sacrilege.’” But the allure of Baldwin — an adaptation respectful to Baldwin — proved too powerful.
Baldwin’s dialogue in the novel is sportive and intellectual, and the exchanges between David and Giovanni poetic in the way of old European films. The rest of the writing reflects David’s innermost thoughts, feelings, impressions and memories. It’s a work that’s necessarily interior, withdrawn into the mind of its protagonist in the exact way the protagonist and his lover — the object of both his desire and his contempt — are withdrawn in that messy little room in Paris.
For this adaptation, then, Sprunger said, they had to “divorce David’s inner monologue — David as narrator — from what we’re presenting and just focus on the events of the play.” And there would be additional changes as well — extra scenes, like a proposal, or another appearance of a briefly mentioned trans character.
“Even though we were making some scenes that didn’t necessarily happen in the book, I never took something out of thin air,” Stovall clarified. “It was always said by someone or the sentiment was somewhere in the novel, and then you just rearrange it and put it somewhere else.”
There wasn’t much of a template to work from. Baldwin adaptations — especially authorized adaptations from the estate — are few and far between. In 1996, an estate-sanctioned adaptation of “Giovanni’s Room” ran at the Drill Hall Arts Center in England, and BBC Radio 3 produced a radio adaptation in 2010. In the past year, however — fittingly, around the time of the recent James Baldwin centennial celebration — there have also been dance adaptations, including a production at Ballet Ashani in Durham, N.C., last year and from Phoenix Dance Theater at Leeds Playhouse in England this spring.
In the Netherlands this winter, the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam premiered a limited-run Dutch-language “Giovanni’s Room” directed by Eline Arbo. Here David and Giovanni moved through a hazy darkness; Giovanni’s room was, quite simply, a square patch of stage framed by downcast lights. It was a grim, brooding translation of the work scored with gloomy original songs, impressionistic dance-sex sequences and lots of synthesizer. I saw the production in January, and its aesthetic was so self-consciously ostentatious that it overshadowed the nuances in Baldwin’s text.
The Quintessence production of “Giovanni’s Room” succeeds largely because of its careful attention to the text. It replicates much of Baldwin’s dialogue, of course, but also mimics the book’s fluid, nonlinear structure. Characters move from memories to reality and occasionally even step out of the present to narrate the action. It’s also a rendering more generous to the world that exists outside of David’s purview, one that isn’t mired in his judgmental, shame-driven inner thoughts but offers the space for other characters’ voices and perspectives. Stovall’s sharp direction showcases the shrewdness and ironies of Baldwin’s writing, and the actor Michael Aurelio shines as a flawless Giovanni, irreverent and seductive with endless reserves of droll wit.
BARRY JENKINS’S 2018 FILM “If Beale Street Could Talk” established a fresh artistic standard for Baldwin adaptations. In the same way Baldwin will, in the course of a paragraph, step from a character’s inner landscape to a larger panorama of Black life, from one particular detail of a back story to a whole philosophy of living, Jenkins’s film uses a kind of visual syntax to evoke meaning even when there is no actual text, via dialogue or voice-over, to reveal the happenings onscreen. Long still shots of the actors, each of whom deliver devastatingly honest performances, are framed and lit as though they’re living portraits from a gallery wall. Even at its most tragic, the film stands as an exquisite celebration of Black love.
The film is a reminder that even decades after his death, Baldwin remains one of our greatest advocates of lives lived openly and freely through love. That matters even more in a moment when Blackness and queerness are being culturally siloed away, as hidden and disregarded as those two young men in their room in Paris. “He’s making our lives elegant and elevated and exalted, and that’s something we had never seen and unfortunately rarely see still today,” Stovall said, attesting to the lasting value of Baldwin’s work.
Adaptations like “If Beale Street Could Talk” and Quintessence’s “Giovanni’s Room” are just the beginning. Last year Fremantle North America announced that it had closed a deal with the Baldwin estate to develop new adaptations of his books for film and TV. And there still exists Baldwin’s own dramatization and film screenplay, somewhere.
This means that the future holds new ways of seeing David and Giovanni in that small room. Now a door to “Giovanni’s Room” is opening, and outside, via stages or screens, not just Paris but the whole world is watching.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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