When Quintessence Theatre’s Artistic Director Alexander Burns opens his company’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room‘ novel, history will be made.
“Baldwin’s book has been instrumental to my journey as a gay man, and my knowledge of it since middle school swept me away; this idea of the expat in Paris and the complexity of its exploration of sexuality among its characters,” says Burns.
Since the publication of his LGBTQIA+ fiction classic in 1956, and its poetic, radical turn on notions of masculinity and homosexuality – things rarely discussed so boldly in popular novel form – Baldwin’s book had never found its way to becoming a movie or a play, despite countless attempts to make it so.
“The way that Baldwin wrote its scenes, how they move, how its energies shift, it’s almost like he had written a screenplay,” says Burns.
Be it financial issues (director Michael Raeburn teamed with Baldwin for a film adaptation with Robert De Niro, but agents demanded too much money) or Baldwin’s estate’s complete refusal of theatrical suitors, ‘Giovanni’s Room’ was nearly doomed to forever stay solely on the page.
However, it took Burn’s push, a background in adaptation and clever playwrights Benjamin Sprunger (Burns’ cousin) and Paul Oakley Stovall (the latter, Burns’ friend and the play’s director) to make a theatrical take on ‘Giovanni’s Room’ live up to its power on the page and turn the heads of the James Baldwin Estate.
“The Estate loved our vision, its fidelity to the novel, and were eager to let us have a go at it, making it come to life at Quintessence,” notes Burns. “It’s amazing when stars align.”
Burns goes on to say that Sprunger and Stovall’s take on ‘Giovanni’s Room’, and the reason its vision piqued the curiosity of the Baldwin Estate stems from this threesome’s roots in Chicago’s valued theater scene and that city’s devotion to the adaptation of literary classics as new plays.
“Northwest University even has classes in performance studies where all you do is train to adapt books into theatrical performance works,” says the director. “That’s very much in the blood of Chicago’s theatrical spirit; to dramatize an author’s voice without losing that author’s voice is a genius superpower.”
In ‘Giovanni’s Room’, that superpower was meant to lift Baldwin’s prose, of his vividly depicted Paris and erotically undulating bodies; “when his words should be onstage, when they should be experienced through a theatrical vision,” says Burns. “What Ben and Paul found was this perfect intersection between letting Baldwin’s voice be very present and letting these characters come to life in a visceral and theatrical fashion.”
Transplanted to Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood and its historic Sedgwick Theater since 2010, Burns and his colleagues look at the aged work of writers, from Shakespeare to Baldwin, and allow the impact of their original time frames – the origin story of Baldwin in the 1950s as opposed to making it contemporary for the 21st century – clearly cutting.
“These were Americans lost throughout the 1950s, and trying to find themselves in Paris,” says Burns. “As Americans, we’ve long had the privilege of being able to get lost, psychologically, career-wise. And Europeans laugh at Americans for not knowing what the hell they are doing with their lives. That is a perspective, then, and is worth looking at in 2025.”
Quintessence world premiere heightens the consciousness of Baldwin’s book while pushing several of its characters into grander, bigger roles. The novel’s specter-like Flaming Princess, a minor character, is now a looming non-binary presence (acted by Midge Nease) as one of the play’s narrators.
Starring Shelby Alayne Antel, Dito van Reigersberg and — as Giovanni and David, the star-crossed lovers, one Italian, the other American — Michael Aureilo and Ethan Check, were given special attention by Burns and Stovall.
“These archetypes of gender, of what is a man had many visions between myself and Paul,” says Burns. “A butch, All-American jock can be so many things now if we look at what a football hero was in 1950 vs today. Similarly, Giovanni in the book is described as a fount of emotion on the verge of rage and despair – that character’s vulnerabilities in the 1950s doesn’t have the context of the present, of mental health issues and prescribed drugs to help anxiety or PDST. There are many ways to approach these characters.”
Burns says Quintessence cast Ethan Check for his ability to portray David as “complexly mendacious, this open naïveté,” Michael Aureilo to act Giovanni as having “this Italian machismo and vulnerability in equal parts,” and staged a world of “nostalgia and memory” with a shadowy Paris of the 1950s where danger and daring sexuality lives and breathes.
‘Giovanni’s Room’ is on stage at Quintessence Theatre now through June 22. For information and tickets, visit quintessencetheatre.org
