The cast of The Till Trilogy: ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till.’ Photo courtesy of Mosaic Theater Company.
The story of Emmett Till is not an easy story to tell. It is a story that is kept out of history books because it is the brutalization of a Black, teenage boy from Chicago who did not return home alive from a trip to Mississippi. Emmett Till, whose nickname was “Bobo,” was visiting his family in the summer of 1955 when he whistled at a white woman working at a store. This simple action led to his kidnapping and torturous murder. The death of Emmett Till was one of the factors that led to the historic civil rights movement across the South.
The collaboration between Bayeza, Wilks, and the phenomenal actors acknowledges the voices of history that should never be forgotten.
Knowing the story and seeing it come to life on stage is like reading a book and already knowing the ending. It is not about the end, but the journey of who Emmett Till was before his wrongful murder at fourteen years old. His life before his death needs to be told and remembered. The play is the first part of a trilogy presented by the Mosaic Theater Company and recalls the last two weeks of his life. Written by Ifa Bayeza, it is directed by Talvin Wilks. The collaboration between Bayeza, Wilks, and the phenomenal actors acknowledges the voices of history that should never be forgotten.
The play’s first scene begins with a beautiful harmonization about the spirit of Emmett Till and the power of his name. The ensemble cast of five, along with Antonio Michael Woodard who plays Emmett Till, envelope the stage with church-like essence by praising the life the young boy had before his murder. The ensemble actors, Billie Krishawn, Rolonda Watts, Jaysen Wright, Jason Bowen, and Vaughn Ryan Midder remind the audience that Till was an innocent child, loving the life that he had.
As Emmett Till, Antonio Michael Woodard delivers a powerful performance by embracing the youthfulness of a young child. His embodiment of Till depicts true, Black boy joy in 1955. His character is seen dancing on stage with Billie Krishawn (Mamie Till-Bradley), joking around with his best friend Wheeler (Jaysen Wright), mocking his family members, having crushes on girls, speaking his mind, stuttering, and other childlike antics. The story goes into detail about the culture shock he faced traveling from Chicago to Mississippi and how children in the south grew up differently than children in other parts of the country. All the actors should be commended for balancing a heart-wrenching story with moments of joy. To tell this story takes a strength that goes beyond words.
The audience must remember that this story is not fictional. Emmett Till’s death still haunts communities around America and has impacted families for generations. These stories of pain should not be glorified but a call to action against racism in this country.
Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
Advisory: Racial violence, racial slurs, and brutality.
“The Ballad of Emmett Till” and the rest of the trilogy runs through November 20, 2022 at The Mosaic Theater Company at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. For more information and purchase tickets, click here. Masks are still required in performance spaces and theaters, but masking in public areas such as lobbies is optional.
L-R Antonio Michael Woodard and Jason Bowen in The Ballad of Emmett Till. Photo courtesy of the production.
Mosaic Theater Company’s production of The Till Trilogy is a three-part play puzzling together the pieces of the tragic story of Emmett Till’s lynching. This piece is unlike anything I have ever seen. It beautifully brings together the fun and playful aspects of Emmett, making the tragedy even more heart wrenching than you initially knew it to be. Writer, Ifa Bayeza, presented a hefty task with an immaculate moment in history and Director, Talvin Wilks, rose to the occasion to transport you right into 1955, as if you personally knew those involved.
We begin the two-day event with part one: The Ballad of Emmett Till. The unraveling of the summer that will go down in history. Wary of knowing the end-result, you feel like you’re watching a lamb raised for slaughter. The dramatic irony is present amongst the audience, but once the production starts you can’t help but be captivated by the performance of Antonio Michael Woodard (Emmett “Bo; Bobo” Till). Telling this story is of monumental importance and you can see Woodard holds this task to the highest standard. It’s as if the bright-eyed Bo from Chicago is standing right in front of you – cracking jokes in his white suit with his special hat, charming those around him with his infectious energy. Again, making the ending even more difficult, feeling as if you’ve lost someone close to you. Mannerisms, movements, spoken rhythm – everything was done so flawlessly and naturally by this immensely talented actor.
L-R Billie Krishawn, Antonio Michael Woodard, Jason Bowen, Rolonda Watts, Vaughn Ryan Midder, and Jaysen Wright in The Ballad of Emmett Till. Photo courtesy of the production.
Though our focus is on Bo for this first show, the story cannot be told without those around him – especially his mother, played by Billie Krishawn, Mamie Till-Bradley. No one can imagine the pain Mamie went through that dreadful summer, yet she does not back down to show the world the disaster she has been faced with. Krishawn portrayed the worries every parent fears when their child goes off on their own in such a personal way. The resilience she had to present after her child was brutally taken from her – a truly grueling task – was amazing. Krishawn embodied not just Mamie, but every other character she took on as well (Simeon Wright and Caroline Bryant). She was in the story as if it were real life. Her reactions felt genuine and she gracefully brought each character to life with the tiniest motions and facial expressions.
Completing the cast of The Ballad of Emmett Till, we have Rolonda Watts (Mamoo, Heluise Woods, and Miss Lizabeth), Jaysen Wright (Wheeler Parker and Roy Bryant), Jason Bowen (Mose Wright, Johnny B. Washington, and H.L. Loggins), and Vaughn Ryan Midder (Maurice Wright, Ruthie May Crawford, and J.W. “Big” Milam), all bringing together those who complete this story. Every person in this group knew this story needed to be told as close to perfect as it could be, and they certainly delivered. There were many hats that had to be worn and everyone worked in tandem with each other. With the many characters being taken on by such a small cast, it can be difficult for it to translate to the audience who is who at which moment. There was no struggle with this talented group. From making a turn, to altering their costume, to switching the accent, you knew when someone new had entered the scene – leaving much up for interpretation, but never causing confusion.
Billie Krishawn in That Summer in Sumner. Photo courtesy of the production.
If you were challenged with seeing only one of the three parts, this show is the best for portraying the reality of Emmett Till’s story in a stunningly horrifying way. It’s such a captivating performance that will leave you with questions and possibly new knowledge that you didn’t have before. Reading about or hearing about it is one thing, but seeing everything unfold in the very room you’re sitting in is a completely new experience. You will grow attached to the characters and feel every emotion you can imagine. The content can be quite intense and disturbing, as it is like what Mamie felt the world needed to see, so you do need to consider if witnessing this is in your best interest. There was absolutely not a dry eye in the house.
Read the full review by Olivia Murray for Broadway World.
The buzz continues throughout the greater Washington area as more people experience the riveting three-play event, “The Till Trilogy,” now on stage through Nov. 20 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Northeast, performed in rotating repertory and presented by Mosaic Theater Company.
The trilogy of works includes: “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” “That Summer in Sumner” and “Benevolence.”
Written by Ifa Bayeza and directed by Talvin Wilks, Mosaic Theater’s artistic director, Reginald L. Douglas, referred to the series of plays as “a testament to the power of theater to interrogate our past, provide insight into the world around us and inspire action and empathy as we look ahead.”
Playwright, Ifa Bayeza
In fact, the playwright’s work, which focuses on the brief life and tragic murder of Emmett Till in 1955 in Money, Mississippi, sheds new light on history while calling us to action today.
Bayeza said the evolution of the work might be best described as “organic.”
“My first effort, ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till,’ when it was performed in Chicago in 2008, had wonderful moments and achieved many things but something wasn’t right to me,” she said. “I was trying to stuff too much into one play. The story was so full and rich that I couldn’t get everything in.”
“When a colleague at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles wanted to bring the ‘Ballad’ to the city, I knew that the venue was too small for the play and the ensemble. So, I began to explore how to make it manageable for small theaters. I truncated the play to just be Emmett’s story, following his journey the last seven days of his life and into the netherworld as well where he attempts to understand what has happened to him. It made it a much stronger play,” she said.
Bayeza, while pleased with the success of “Ballad” and the two other plays that would follow, said she began the process because she wanted to highlight the details behind a youth’s rite of passage – tragically aborted because of the intrusion of white violence.
In the second and third parts of the trilogy, she also gave attention to Mose Wright, Emmett’s uncle, who witnessed the youth’s abduction and who later testified in court against the accused murders, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam – an act which placed his life and the lives of his family in grave danger.
She also brought greater attention to the corps of reporters from the Black press, specifically members of Ebony and Jet, who attended the trial and shared the details with readers across the nation.
As Bayeza said, it remains a story that we can ill-afford to forget.
“The Till saga is a national foundational myth,” she said. “It’s a story for now – it’s always a timely story. We continue to return to it because we must. This story had so many crossroads of experience from the assassinations of the Kennedys to being the spark of the Civil Rights Movement to being the synergy and beginning of social music phases and genres like rock and roll.”
“My hope as an artist is that this story will serve as a means of healing and an acknowledgement of so many others who have endured trauma over the generations. It has a poetic resonance that allows for the inclusion of numerous manifestations of symbolism that I explore throughout the three plays.”
“ Ultimately, I wanted the trilogy to lift up others, especially mothers like Mamie Till, who are still going through similar forms of trauma and the loss of children either to urban or police violence. Before we can return to battle for justice and lead the next form of protest, we must experience the grief so the healing process can begin,” Bayeza said.
“The Till Trilogy” continues through Nov. 20. For more information, go to www.mosiactheater.org.
Decades in the making, a trio of plays celebrates the life of the murdered Black teen Emmett Till and commemorates his tragic 1955 death.
Antonio Michael Woodard as Emmett Till in “The Ballad of Emmett Till.” (Teresa Castracane)
When playwright Ifa Bayeza set out in the late 1990s to tell the story of Emmett Till — the Black 14-year-old who was abducted and lynched by two White men in 1955 Mississippi — the United States was still recovering from a crack epidemic that disproportionately affected African American communities. In reflecting on Till, Bayeza says she wanted to “pull our own youth back from that brink, to say, ‘We have to see ourselves as human beings.’ ”
Ifa Bayeza, Playwright
The result was “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” a celebration of Till’s life and retelling of his tragic death that premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2008. Now an updated version of that play is onstage at Mosaic Theater in repertory with two more Till-centric works from Bayeza: “Benevolence,” which debuted at Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minn., in 2019, and the world premiere of “That Summer in Sumner.”
Together, the three plays — all directed by Talvin Wilks and drawing from the same 10-person cast — make up “The Till Trilogy.” While the drug epidemic that prompted the project is mercifully in the past, the social justice movement’s resurgence and the corresponding conversation over how to teach Black American history have punctuated the subject matter’s importance in newfound ways.
“The plays show why it is of value to understand our history and to witness it,” Wilks adds, “because these stories in many ways are still suppressed and repressed.”
Although the original production of “Ballad” was a sprawling, 2½-hour history play, Bayeza streamlined it into a 90-minute chamber piece for a 2010 production at Los Angeles’s Fountain Theatre. The distillation improved “Ballad,” Bayeza says, but she still found herself bothered by the scenes that she cut.
Anna Theoni DiGiovanni, left, and Scott Ward Abernethy as Carolyn and Roy Bryant in “Benevolence.” (Teresa Castracane)
So Bayeza revisited some of that excised material, expanded on it and wrote “Benevolence,” a decades-spanning examination of Till’s legacy through the eyes of two couples — one Black, one White — grappling with his death. Earlier this year, she completed work on a third play, also derived from trimmed “Ballad” scenes: “That Summer in Sumner,” which explores the Till murder trial and the Black journalists who covered the case.
“The trilogy really evolved from my commitment to telling this sacred story as best I could,” Bayeza says, “and to represent it with the epic fullness that it felt like to me.”
Wilks directed a 2014 version of “Ballad” at Penumbra Theatre before returning there to helm the “Benevolence” premiere. In mounting the full trilogy, he has reimagined those productions so that all three plays work in harmony, while still functioning as stand-alone stories. Bayeza also massaged the plays’ through lines by tweaking the scripts throughout the rehearsal process.
“I learned a lot having directed those first two plays,” Wilks says. “There’s a foundation there. But thinking of them in tandem sort of is a whole new game. New collaborators, new artistry, new innovation, but also — I’ll say it — limitations. The framework brings a kind of limiting factor to how you uniquely envision each play.”
The Mosaic production has been a long time coming: Wilks and the “Till Trilogy” company were a month into rehearsal in the spring of 2020 when pandemic closures put the endeavor on hold. Since then, real-world developments have deepened the plays’ resonance, from the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to the Emmett Till Antilynching Act that President Biden signed into law earlier this year.
“It had already felt really relevant,” says Billie Krishawn, who plays six characters — including Till’s mother, Mamie — across the three plays. “But then the world shut down and the events throughout the pandemic happened, with Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and countless names that I couldn’t even begin to list off and do it justice. Then I felt even deeper inside of the movement.”
Front seat, from left: Jaysen Wright and Vaughn Ryan Midder; back seat, from left: Scott Ward Abernethy and Rolonda Watts play journalists from Ebony and Jet magazine in “That Summer in Sumner.” (Teresa Castracane)
Krishawn wasn’t alone in forging an intimate connection with Till’s story. Antonio Michael Woodard, who portrays Till in two of the plays, says he was making deliveries for DoorDash in his hometown of Oakland, Calif., when a man in an affluent neighborhood confronted him on the street and screamed a racial slur at him. “That ran through my body in a particular way,” Woodard recalls. With Till on his mind, he says, he kept his calm.
“You want to do something, but in this society, if I was to do something, I’d be in the wrong,” Woodard says. “Literally the next day, I kid you not, I got the offer to play Emmett Till. That’s how I know I’m interconnected and I have a mission. I’m on assignment to do this, because I don’t believe I would have gone through that for no reason.”
For the predominantly Black cast, the production’s challenges go beyond the creative and logistical burdens of playing various characters over multiple plays. There’s also the matter of processing the traumatic material. To help the Black actors navigate that challenge, Wilks says, the production has used mental health advisers and a fight and intimacy director.
“We have to be mindful of that wonderful, generous and courageous spirit,” Wilks says. “These actors are stepping into these roles to share these stories for a community still witnessing and wrestling and reckoning with this history.”
That history is still evolving. This past August, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman whose accusation of a sexual advance led to Till’s lynching, on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter, despite the discovery of an unserved warrant for her arrest. And “The Till Trilogy” isn’t alone in presenting an artistic depiction of Till’s story: The film “Till,” which tracks Mamie Till’s pursuit of justice following her son’s death, arrives in theaters this week.
“I do see the Till saga as a national foundation myth, really looking in an epic and poetic way at how the fault line of race cuts across geography, cuts across gender, cuts across class, cuts across politics and the law,” Bayeza says. “It’s like a flash of lightning in that so many elements come together in this tragedy of Emmett Till that it speaks to the time — whenever that time is.”
If you go
The Till Trilogy
Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street NE. 202-399-7993, ext. 501. mosaictheater.org.
Four Mosaic Theater Company partners making this exciting premiere of a rotating repertory production of the Emmett Till Trilogy of plays (“The Ballad of Emmett Till,” “That Summer in Sumner,” and “Benevolence”) possible were interviewed for the podcast.
“This latest Embracing Arlington Arts Educational Podcast Series focuses not only on the premiere, but also to embellish and continue the conversation about racial justice in our nation today and to discuss how the theater industry is, and should be spurring those discussions,” stated Janet Kopenhaver, the organization’s president.
Playwright, Ifa Bayeza
The Educational Podcast series features renowned playwright Ifa Bayeza who wrote all three plays; Talvin Wilks, Director; Reginald Douglas, Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater Company; and Antonio Michael Woodard, Actor (portraying Emmett Till). All four expressed their views and insight on the continued impact of this critical event in our country’s history and the responsibility of the theater industry to keep the conversation going.
Ms. Bayeza wrote this series of plays to “celebrate the joy and majesty of this family.” She is hoping to challenge our contemporary audiences to think about what we are going to do to end racial injustice. “If the Till saga was the spark of the Civil Rights movement, I hope to stimulate sparks in audience members to do something,” she concluded in the interview.
Mr. Wilks offered resounding support for the importance of the media in bringing visibility to the injustices of racism, but questions “why does it take an image to gain people’s attention?” He also expounded upon why these plays are important to see in order to understand the significant impact of the Emmett Till murder in our nation’s history.
As Mosaic Theater Company’s Artistic Director, Mr. Douglas expressed his strong belief that the theater industry plays a big role in spurring audience members to become active and energized about combating racial injustice. “I do think that art is action,” Douglas explained. “It sparks dialogue about our community, makes people think and to take action,” Douglas added.
Rounding out the series was a very thought-provoking interview with Actor Antonio Michael Woodard who portrays Emmett Till. To him, theater has always been a catalyst for change and an instrument to encourage conversations about important social issues in our nation. He urged audience members to see the plays to understand what happened in 1955 and to ensure that it never happens again. “You can’t get where you’re going until you look back,” he concluded.
The Till Trilogy is a series of plays by noted playwright Ifa Bayeza that reflect on the life, death, and legacy of Emmett Till, whose murder in 1955 remains one of the most pivotal moments in American history. Under the direction of the acclaimed Talvin Wilks, the three plays – The Ballad of Emmett Till, Benevolence, and the world premiere That Summer in Sumner – will star 10 actors performing in rotating repertory for the first time. Filled with music, poetry, and imagination, this rare theatrical event will honor the ongoing fight for racial justice in our country and offer audiences of all ages an opportunity for collective reckoning, reflection, and response. Mosaic Theater Company of DC produces bold, culturally diverse theater that illuminates critical issues, elevates fresh voices, and sparks connection among communities throughout our region and beyond.
Embracing Arlington Arts is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance the vibrancy and health of arts and culture. Interested supporters are encouraged to “follow” and “like” us on Facebook; and follow us on Twitter.
