“The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time — or perhaps you have no sense of time at all.” — Giovanni in Giovanni’s Room
There will never be a time in America where (or when) James Baldwin’s words won’t resonate with the moments and the movements of our lived experiences. Baldwin bent America’s moral arc toward justice, and in so doing, he established a record of resistance that continues to serve as a literary paragon of protest, a panacea for this political moment.
Benjamin Sprunger and Paul Oakley Stovall are the co-adaptors of James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel Giovanni’s Room, now playing at the Sedgwick Theater in Germantown with the Quintessence Theatre Group. The production has been extended twice and will now run through July 6, 2025.
Stovall and Sprunger, through their own perseverance and collaboration, somehow secured the rights to adapt Baldwin’s lesser-known novel. Baldwin originally struggled to find a publishing home for Giovanni’s Room because he — a Black man — deigned to write about the sexuality of a White man, but also because writing a novel featuring multiple gay and/or bisexual characters at a time when homosexual sex was still illegal in many states was a nonstarter for American publishers in the middle of the 20th century.
“It started over 15 years ago,” Sprunger says. “I was working on my own, fashioning bits of dialogue from the novel into a play that ended up sort of sounding like a radio play or like a reader’s theater play.” Sprunger contacted the estate about four times between 2008 and 2011, including Baldwin’s sister. “And they were very cordial and very nice to me, but basically said, you’re not a playwright. Why would we give you the rights to this amazing novel by one of the best American writers out there?’”
Sprunger was not deterred. Recognizing the emotional and structural complexity of adapting Giovanni’s Room for the stage, Sprunger brought in a trusted collaborator — playwright and performer Paul Oakley Stovall — to help reshape Baldwin’s vision for the stage. The decision proved transformative. Together, they didn’t just adapt the novel; they interrogated it, cracked it open, and invited Baldwin’s ghost into the theater. What emerged was not only a play, but a meditation on the consequences of repression and the unbearable cost of emotional exile.
In staging Giovanni’s Room, Sprunger and Stovall don’t just return Baldwin to us. They return us to Baldwin.
“I think what people will find here is that what they have in common with the protagonist David is he tries to erase, block, and avoid his trauma,” Stovall explains. “And when you do that, the trauma will grow into a ferocious, terrified beast. And it will first eat and destroy everything around you, as David does. And then, when it runs out of things to feast on, it’ll turn on the host. So I think it’s a beautiful, exquisitely complex, cautionary tale of how to love yourself.”
That insight pulses through every moment of the production. David’s journey is not simply one of sexual identity or cultural shame — it is an odyssey through the fractured terrain of a man at odds with himself. The adaptation makes clear that this is Baldwin’s deeper project: not just to map forbidden love, but to chart the inner collapse that occurs when we betray our most intimate truths. Under Sprunger and Stovall’s careful hands, David becomes less a tragic figure and more a mirror — one in which the audience might recognize their own evasions, denials, and longing for redemption.
A poetic symmetry to this play here and now
Stovall pushes back gently at categorizing this work as James Baldwin (a Black gay man) writing about the life of a White American gay man in Paris. “David has a fiancée. It says in the book, they have sex a lot. Giovanni has a girlfriend with whom they have a child,” says Stovall, “So it’s more like wrestling with this idea of what sexuality is. And that’s why I think everyone will find themselves in it. Is your sexuality who you connect with in your heart, or is it with what you do with your private part? And what is the difference?”
There is a certain poetic symmetry to a stage adaptation of Giovanni’s Room arriving in Philadelphia, a city that not only holds its own Baldwinian echoes of race, sexuality, and exile, but is also home to the iconic Philly AIDS Thrift Giovanni’s Room bookstore — one of the oldest LGBTQ+ bookstores in the United States. That this reimagining should come to life here is more than a coincidence; it is a communion.
Sprunger and Stovall’s adaptation is not simply “faithful” to James Baldwin’s 1956 novel. Serious Baldwin readers know, faithfulness is far too brittle a word for his work. Sprunger and Stovall’s version is revelatory. It doesn’t just revive the novel — it realizes a vision Baldwin himself once held dear: to adapt Giovanni’s Room into a feature film. What Baldwin never saw to completion, these artists have staged with daring grace and theatrical ingenuity.
Stovall, who co-wrote and co-directed the piece, frames the production of the project this way: “We love painting ourselves into a corner. We love the challenge of, well, how do we get out of this? How do we make the ocean appear? How do we suddenly go to the south of France?” This is theater as possibility — a refusal of the literal in favor of the imagistic, childlike conviction that if the actor believes, so too will the audience. One piece of fabric can become a coastline. One projected image can crack open an entire continent of feeling.
“I think it’s a beautiful, exquisitely complex, cautionary tale of how to love yourself.” — Paul Oakley Stovall
But this production’s emotional and political power lies not only in its visual invention. It lies in its moral and psychological clarity. In the world of Giovanni’s Room, love is dangerous. To love Giovanni — to see him, to mourn him — is to fracture the myth of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality that sustains illusions of fixed American identities.
In both the play and the novel, Giovanni is a disruptive presence. He is tender and tempestuous, intimate and indicting. His portrayal on stage — complex and at times ferocious — reminds us that he is not merely a tragic figure. He is a political one. As literary scholar Jurgen Grandt writes: “Giovanni’s character … constitutes a threat to the social construction of Americanness as white, male, and, in this case, heterosexual. Accordingly, his character constitutes a threat to the entire idea of cultural authenticity because he reveals authenticity as always already ‘miscegenated’ and hence illusory.”
That illusion is the novel’s — and the play’s — most dangerous lie. David, the protagonist, is torn between his desire for Giovanni and his desperate need to perform the role of “a real American man.” Sadly, and again in Baldwin’s timely and timeless manner, David’s internal conflict continues to afflict American men to the total detriment of the project of American masculinity, and in these times, the delusions of too many leaders in America’s government. David wants to be good. He wants to be safe. But Giovanni, with his unrelenting honesty and vulnerability, won’t let him hide. Giovanni deconstructs the vagaries of American colonial tourism in all of its multifaceted madness.
In a harrowing and brilliant exchange on the eve of Giovanni’s execution by guillotine, Giovanni spits the truth of American hypocrisy back at David:
I can see you, many years from now, coming through our village in the ugly fat American motor car you will surely have … shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time.
The “empty smiles” of Americans is a line that forces playgoers to consider their own facades and all that hides behind their American smiles. It’s a line that is vicious and tender, loving and accusatory, and when it’s said in a theater, it lands like a stone through a stained-glass window. Baldwin’s indictment of American colonial arrogance and emotional repression resonates even louder today, as Americans of all stripes continue to wrestle with identity, authenticity, even as the federal government rejects the value of belonging. Through this adaptation, Baldwin reminds us that our smiles are empty, and the world knows this.
And so, in Philadelphia, where Giovanni’s Room lives on both as literature and as a literal space — a sanctuary of queer thought and survival — this production finds its most haunting resonance. In staging Giovanni’s Room, Sprunger and Stovall don’t just return Baldwin to us. They return us to Baldwin.
They remind us that art, at its best, is not simply what we watch. It’s what we challenge ourselves to confront. The contradictory truths we’re forced to hold. The people — dangerous, vulnerable, radiant — we’re asked to love.
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