NEW YORK, NY.- One spring day in 1964, among the glittering theater marquees of Times Square, James Baldwin was en route to rehearsal for his new Broadway production, “Blues for Mister Charlie,” and he’d had a lot on his mind. Four little girls had been killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, just months earlier, and the white producers of his play had been after him to soften the script, suggesting it might be inappropriate for Broadway. By the time he reached the theater, he was furious.

David Leeming, Baldwin’s friend and biographer, recently recalled that day’s “horrible rehearsal,” in which Baldwin stormed in and climbed a ladder. Towering over the cast and crew, he went on a tirade, Leeming, 87, said in an interview, “essentially accusing them of failing to see his vision.”

Besides cutting a swear word or two from the script, Baldwin did not waver, though not without fear — fear of the form and fear that he might not adequately portray the monstrosity and humanity of white Southern hate. The critics eventually weighed in, writing of his failure on both fronts, and struggles at the box office ensured the playwright’s debut on Broadway would be brief.

When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of 63, he left a voluminous oeuvre. Deemed a “prophet” and a “witness,” he has experienced a revival in the past decade that quickened in 2024 — with reading guides, film screenings and symposiums — for the centennial of his birth on Aug. 2.

His legacy is often most embraced through his essays and fiction, though another form may have better suited his artistry: the play.

“He loved the connection, the immediate connection between the audience and the artist that occurred in the theater,” Leeming said.

It’s fitting, then, that this year of celebration coincides with the 60th anniversary of “Blues for Mister Charlie,” an impassioned play about the murder of a Black man that implicates progressive white viewers. The drama, which opened in a white-dominated environment inimical to his ambition, was not only among his most monumental accomplishments, but also, as Leeming said, a revolution on the midcentury Great White Way.

“He leads with love, which I endeavor to do, and he’s not afraid to say what needs to be said,” acclaimed playwright Suzan-Lori Parks said of Baldwin in an interview. Parks, who studied fiction writing as his student in 1983, said Baldwin belongs among the titans of Black theater “because he was one of the people who stepped onto the stage, who stood in the light in front of audiences,” she said, referring to his work through “Blues,” “and demanded that the conversation happen.”

For “Blues,” Baldwin’s art would imitate life, drawing inspiration from two racially motivated Mississippi murders: that of Emmett Till in 1955 and another that he learned about in 1963, while traveling with the NAACP officer Medgar Evers. As chronicled in Leeming’s biography, Evers was investigating the death of a Black man who had been killed, it seemed, by a white shopkeeper who was attracted to the murdered man’s wife. Baldwin became fixated on the crime’s plot and pathos, and on a church he saw in the countryside, which he imagined as a stage.

This observation parallels Baldwin’s earliest acts of creation. As a teenager, he commanded a pulpit in Harlem, which taught him the intimacy between preacher and congregant. He wanted to re-create these dramatic moments “to involve the people, even against their will,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Amen Corner,” his first play. “To shake them up, and, hopefully, to change them.”

British actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste said it was thrilling to embody Baldwin’s words for an audience, as she did in 2013 when she starred in “The Amen Corner” in London.

“That’s a challenge that you have when doing Baldwin to sort of, like, not fall in love with the words themselves,” she said in an interview. “But focus on the emotion and what’s driving those words.”

After completing his first novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (set in a church), Baldwin wrote “The Amen Corner” (likewise set in a church); his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was also workshopped as a play. Baldwin wrote “Blues” in 1963, after the publication of “The Fire Next Time,” which had elevated the Harlem-born writer to international renown. Fame redoubled Baldwin’s confidence, Leeming said, and “his willingness to express his anger,” which was inflamed when a white supremacist assassinated Evers in Mississippi in June 1963.

“When he died, something entered into me which I cannot describe,” Baldwin wrote in the notes for the play. “I resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting this play done.”

Otherworldly resolve would be necessary to actualize his artistic endeavor because Broadway was dominated by white theatermakers and audiences. Baldwin therefore didn’t trust, or fully respect, the American theater, and soon became frustrated with his white producers, notably when they resisted his insistence on reducing ticket prices so that more Black audiences could attend — a necessity to achieve his artistic ends. “Blues” wasn’t “a Negro play,” or just about “civil rights,” he said, but “about a state of mind and relationship of people to each other.” To access this meaning, white and Black theatergoers must be in the room together. “I want to shock the people,” he said, adding, “I want to trick them into an experience which I think is important.”

Among shows that challenged Broadway’s demographics was Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), the first play by a Black woman on Broadway. Baldwin met Hansberry in 1958 during the “Giovanni’s Room” workshop, which began their “intimate intellectual companionship,” as described by the Hansberry scholar Imani Perry. His affection for her is noted in “Sweet Lorraine,” an essay written after her death in 1965. In it, Baldwin recalls her importance to the stage, and notes that he had never seen so many Black people in the theater before “Raisin” — they had ignored the theater, he wrote, “because the theater had always ignored them.”

On April 23, 1964, “Blues” opened at the ANTA theater. The plot follows Richard, a young, outspoken Black musician returning home to the South, to “Plaguetown,” a name that casts an allegorical sheen over the story. He is murdered by a white racist shopkeeper, and a sham trial ensues, exposing the diffidence of the drama’s white liberal character. The staging racially segregates the townspeople, which juxtaposes, and charges, the mixed, intimate audience, said Leeming, who attended the premiere. Everyone “came to the play with very different possibilities, very different hopes, very different fears,” he recalled. “That’s what made it so terrifying and moving.”

Reviews were critical — with The Village Voice claiming it “falls into the traps of all propagandistic art” — though The New York Times was favorable, seeing “fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes.” The negative reviews upset Baldwin, but he believed he had achieved his goal, Leeming said, and believed white liberals’ discomfort proved the play’s relevance.

Existential problems came quickly: A month after the opening, the producers announced the play would close in a week. The discounted tickets made the production financially unsustainable, they said, leaving Baldwin feeling betrayed, Leeming said. A fundraising campaign briefly averted closure, but about four months after opening, Baldwin’s debut ended.

Leeming said the “Blues” era was the most emotional of Baldwin’s life. He recalled late nights at the writer’s apartment, listening as he ruminated over the conflict between his natural tendencies to love and the realities of life that made him angry; and over tensions with the production, which mirrored the play’s themes and the nation’s conflicts — “essentially listening to what was his personal blues song.”

Jean-Baptiste, the actress, said she shared Baldwin’s frustrations. “I connect to him in the sense that to be an artist, and to be a Black artist, is a challenge when the gatekeepers, if you like,” she said, “don’t understand where you’re coming from.”

She added: “To be able to still create under those confines is a bloody feat.”

In an essay for “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” published in March, Jean-Baptiste wrote about moving to Los Angeles in 2002 because of the racism she encountered in the British film industry. She recognized that this mirrored Baldwin’s move to Paris, which was necessary to his becoming a writer. Jean-Baptiste wouldn’t work in London for about a decade, and it was fitting, she wrote, given the circumstances of her departure, that a revival of Baldwin’s words brought her home.

In recent years, criticism of Broadway’s lack of diversity has led to some change. Since the anti-racism movements in 2020, the percentage of Broadway theatergoers who identify as BIPOC has increased, the Broadway League reported, and plays by Baldwin’s Black contemporaries are being revived, including Ossie Davis’ “Purlie Victorious” (1961) last season, and, during the 2022-23 season, Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964). Alice Childress’ “Trouble in Mind,” whose original Broadway production imploded in the 1950s after conflicts with the white producers, finally opened on Broadway in 2021.

According to Wendell Pierce, a producer, actor and founder of Black Theater United, an advocacy group formed in 2020, lasting change requires vigilance. In an interview, he said he recognizes that progress ebbs and flows. Baldwin made demands of theater’s art and business, Pierce said, “and those demands, we are still trying to meet to this day.”

Baldwin himself was back on Broadway in 1965 with “The Amen Corner,” which later had a brief run as a musical in 1983. But “Blues” has never returned to Broadway.

Before his death, Baldwin, in a conversation with Leeming, mused a hypothetical: If he could live his life over again, perhaps he would devote himself exclusively to the stage. One of his last works, which he left unfinished, was a play.

Another way to consider Baldwin’s legacy in the theater is his influence on Parks. “He was such a generous and gracious teacher,” she said, and it was at his prodding that she considered writing plays. “He thought I would make something of myself as a writer,” she said, “and I did not have the heart to prove him wrong.”

In her apartment, the class evaluation Baldwin wrote for her is framed on the wall, she said; and his books are in a special stack with a “saint” Baldwin candle. He didn’t pass the torch, she said, he lit those of others “so that we could all burn bright and walk in his company.”

Hansberry put it another way 60 years ago, during the run of “Blues”: “Jimmy Baldwin’s been accused of being excessive,” she told the Times. “He’s only scratched the surface.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.