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.
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Opening at Mosaic Theatre Company on Oct. 4, the trilogy’s director, “We know the end at the beginning, so the point of Ballad is to give him that joy back.”
“What if we think about Till’s legacy rather than his death?”
This is the question that animates Mosaic Theatre Company’s The Till Trilogy, an ambitious mounting of playwright Ifa Bayeza’s three-part opus chronicling the life, death, and enduring influence of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal murder in 1955 helped fire the civil rights movement. Two of the plays—The Ballad of Emmett Till, which follows young Emmett on his fateful trip to Mississippi; and Benevolence, a look at two couples, one Black and one White, wrestling with Till’s murder—have previously been onstage. Now Bayeza completes the saga with That Summer in Sumner, a dramatization of the Mississippi trial that set Till’s killers free paired with the story of the Black journalists who endeavored to uncover the truth.
The three plays are staged in repertory with a company of 10 actors; audiences can enjoy the plays in any order, and each stands on its own. The production anchors a sprawling series of free events dedicated to honoring Till’s legacy, with discussions and readings taking place in museums, community centers, and libraries across the D.C. metro area. Together, the unique repertory and extensive programming represent an opportunity for Mosaic, under the new leadership of Artistic Director Reginald L. Douglas, to strengthen local ties and draw audiences into a pivotal moment in American civil rights history—one that Bayeza has described, unabashedly, as the stuff of myth and epic.
Born into a family of artists and activists, Bayeza has always mixed creativity with politics. At 15, she got her first summer job working with her father, a physician, at a migrant camp in New Jersey, where workers often lived in destitute conditions. She vividly recalls one child, maybe 8 years old, whose body was riddled with rat bites and whose face was so world-weary he looked like an old man. “That was a transformative moment,” she tells City Paper. “Seeing what were, to me, the last vestiges of what American slavery was like, I was so stunned that I committed myself to chronicling my people. The wonder and allure of theater was the way I thought I could best do it.”
It was the early 1970s and around that same time Bayeza first learned the story of Emmett Till via a reprint of Jet magazine. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, famously demanded an open-casket funeral so the world could see what Jim Crow injustice had wrought on her child; she urged Jet to publish photos of his body, and the publication quickly took the story national. Like many, the teenage Bayeza was horrified, and changed, by what she saw.
As an adult, Bayeza delved into Till’s life, even meeting with friends and family members who knew him personally. Her findings generated the foundations of The Ballad of Emmett Till, which premiered in 2008 at the Goodman Theatre in Till’s hometown of Chicago. One of Till’s childhood friends spoke to Bayeza personally and gave the play her stamp of approval. “She wrote me a letter to say that she had to close her eyes to realize that wasn’t Emmett on the stage,” Bayeza says.
Since its debut, The Ballad has been produced across the country, even as Bayeza has tinkered with its structure to accommodate different casting demands. Now, with the repertory at Mosaic, she has a chance not only to bring the project full circle with That Summer in Sumner but to mold all three plays into a collective, a process she describes as both exciting and daunting.
She has an experienced hand at the wheel in Talvin Wilks, who directed a previous production of The Ballad and the 2018 world premiere of Benevolence, both at Penumbra Theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Mosaic’s previous artistic director, Ari Roth, attended the debut of Benevolence, and initiated plans to produce the full trilogy in D.C. Wilks remained attached to the Mosaic project despite Roth’s departure in the fall of 2020 and the cancellation of the run originally planned for that year.
Director Talvin Wilks in rehearsal for That Summer in Sumner; Credit: Billie Krishawn
While The Ballad and Benevolence are familiar territory, Wilks sees his work as anything but a retread. “Can you learn from and be informed by the first idea, but not necessarily replicate it?” he muses. “This is not like a touring production or a road show; it’s actually, in its own right, a new production.”
These new productions come at a time when Till’s case is garnering fresh press. In August, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indictCarolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman who accused Till of harassing her, prompting her husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother J.W. Milam to kidnap, torture, and lynch the boy. The grand jury’s decision came after the June discovery of an unserved arrest warrant that named all three on suspicion of kidnapping and manslaughter. Later this year, a high-profile film titled Till, directed by Chinonye Chukwu, will bring the events to the screen while drawing focus to Mamie Till-Mobley’s activism.
For Wilks, these developments might make the case seem newly relevant, but it’s all part of a much larger arc. “There’s always been a call on Emmett Till when we’ve traveled through the elements of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown,” he reminds us. “Emmett and Mamie Till are of our legacy.” As for what the new developments mean for the production, Wilks understands it might bring people to the theater, but insists it doesn’t impact how they think about the work.
What does impact the work is Bayeza’s drive to recapture who Emmett was as a person before he became a tragic icon. During rehearsal for a pivotal scene in The Ballad in which Emmett, known by his nickname “Bo,” pleads with his mother to let him travel to Mississippi, Wilks emphasized the need to embrace Black boy joy. “It’s very important because that’s what Ifa has done with Ballad, especially, and even in the way he travels through That Summer in Sumner,” Wilks says. “It’s giving him his adolescence back, seeing him as a joyful child who loved to tell jokes, loved bubble gum, loved nice things, and was quite a dresser. We know the end at the beginning, so the point of Ballad is to give him that joy back.”
Playwright Ifa Bayeza speaks at the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center as part of Mosaic’s community engagement opportunities; Credit: Jhon Ochoa
During the scene, Bo is portrayed by three actors, forming his own chorus. The Ballad’s “fulltime” Bo, Antonio Michael Woodard, along with Vaughn Ryan Midder and Jaysen Wright, tease and plead with his mother, played by Billie Krishawn. Wilks and the cast work through the beats at the table in a rehearsal room covered by a comprehensive historical timeline, courtesy of the production’s dramaturg, Dr. Faedra Chatard Carpenter. With the help of choreographer and assistant director Sandra L. Holloway, the scene rises from the table and lands on its feet as a sort of doo-wop number. The three Bos step to and from Krishawn’s Mamie, snapping in time, moving lithe and free like the man he is itching to become.
Throughout the scene, Mamie instructs her son to mind his place—to not even look at White women, let alone speak to them. “Mississippi is not Chicago,” Mamie reminds him sharply. “It’s the South.” The warning rings hollow against his youthful vigor but carries a heavy burden of history for the contemporary audience.
At the Anacostia Community Museum, site of one Mosaic’s many community events, Bayeza performed a reading of the same scene and several others before opening the floor to discussion. Her knowing rendition of Till’s adolescent longings earned appreciative laughs, and the room hummed with agreement as she described the poetry threaded through Till’s history. Others testified to the grim personal significance of Till’s story, echoing Bayeza’s teenage awakening.
Similar events dot the calendar throughout the fall, forming the expansive outreach that Douglas sees as fundamental to his mission. “We want to be an organization that can bring people together, and that’s inherent in our name: Mosaic,” he explains. “Different people, different perspectives, coming together to create something beautiful.” It’s one of many signature projects Douglas is overseeing in his first full season, which also includes a multiyear oral history project focused on H Street NE and a series of infrastructural changes designed to make Mosaic a better place to work.
Like Bayeza, Douglas grew up seeing art and activism in unity with one another. “So much of The Till Trilogy is an opportunity not to forget, but also a call to action,” he says. “A call to not repeat those mistakes of the past, to reconsider our relationship to justice and to one another.” For Bayeza, The Till Trilogy arrives at a point when addressing those mistakes is vital to stemming the tide of White hostility that echoes Mississippi circa 1955. “I’m hoping this will alert us to what we’re up against,” she warns. “And then get us thinking creatively and positively about what we can do, what we need to do, and how we’re gonna do it.”
“Rebuilding the public square is what theater can do,” she adds. As its ambitions attest, Mosaic Theatre Company is running on that same conviction.
The Till Trilogy, written by Ifa Bayeza and directed by Talvin Wilks, runs in repertory Oct. 4 through Nov. 20 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. (The Ballad of Emmett Till opens Oct. 4; That Summer in Sumner opens Oct. 5; and Benevolence opens Oct. 6.) mosaictheatre.org. $50–$64.
Review by Jared Strange for the Washington City Paper.
Cal Shakes’ new production centers Blackness, and features live accompaniment by jazz favorite Marcus Shelby.
Dawn Monique Williams, Director
Although she faces stiff competition, you pretty much could call Aurora Theatre Company’s associate artistic director Dawn Monique Williams Shakespeare’s biggest fan. She has acted, directed, and been a dramaturg for his plays, as well as teaching them at Cal State East Bay and Sacramento State.
“[His work] contains multitudes with such a wide, full, complex range of human emotions,” she told 48hills. “I love that his plays are messy, and the dramaturgy is imperfect. He wrote everything. I was just lecturing to my class that Midsummer follows the Aristotelian structure of taking place in 24 hours, and Pericles is a 15-year journey. He has plays where ghosts show up. There’s magic and romance and the supernatural, and it’s all deeply resonant.”
Williams is co-directing Marcus Gardley’s contemporary translation of King Lear at the California Shakespeare Company through October 2. Her co-director for Lear is Eric Ting, who is in his last season as Cal Shakes’ artistic director. Williams thinks that Ting’s deep commitment to anti-racism, and to bringing new voices to the theater has made Cal Shakes even more exciting.
“With Eric, the programming is so dynamic, while still being on brand,” she said. “We can still do classic language plays and create new classics. The faces, bodies, and humans making work at the Bruns have expanded.”
The work on Lear started a few years ago, a long process that involved removing antiquated language from teh play while keeping the spirit intact. Cal Shakes worked in partnership with Play On Shakespeare on the project, and Gardley and Ting even played featured roles on Play On’s podcast.
Gardley, a superstar Obie-winning playwright who has written screenplays for the upcoming Marvin Gaye biopic What’s Going On, and Amazon’s The Color Purple Musical, also wrote the wildly-successful 2017 show black odyssey for Cal Shakes, which Ting directed.
Williams, who grew up in Oakland—as Gardley did—says black odyssey was the first play that she saw whose setting felt familiar.
“It wasn’t set in New York,” she said. “It has references to where I grew up.” She mentioned an insider moment in which one character pokes fun at another by calling East 14th Street “International Boulevard,” a revisionist name that most long-time residents decline to use.
I have written a trio of plays called The Till Trilogy—to try to do justice to what I consider a major myth of modern America. If, as WEB DuBois stated, the problem of the 20th century was the color line, Emmett Till stood at the crossroads, and stands there still.
The Ballad of Emmett Tillis an ensemble play for six Black actors, exploring of the final days in the life of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Till’s murder and his mother’s subsequent decision to have an open-casket funeral are believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Ballad is a contemporary telling of Emmett’s story, a jazz integration of past and present, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself. It is the story of a quest, Emmett’s pursuit of happiness, of liberty and ultimately of life.
In That Summer in Sumner, we are introduced to an integrated story and cast and thus a faint stirring of possibility, and yet the pall of the nation’s historic compact with the injustice of enslavement shrouds every choice and move. While Brown vs. the Board of Education suggests the promise of a new America, a Confederate statue looms over courthouse in Sumner. In this tiny Mississippi hamlet, where two white men are on trial for the murder of a black boy, a team of reporters scramble to uncover the truth and to get justice, but they are in for far more than they bargained for.
Benevolence explores the transformation in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of Emmett’s death, the toll of the legacy of human bondage on the smallest units of our society, the family and the individual. Seen from the eyes of two women and the men in their lives, it is an intimate play, a tale of love and loss and desire. It, too, is a quest … for redemption.
While there is not space enough in the print program to name the countless people who have aided me on this journey. I wish, especially, to thank Emmett’s extended family, all of whom have been most generous with their time, their memories and insight. In Argo, Pastor Wheeler Parker, Jr., Elder Simeon Wright, childhood friends John Goodwin and Turner Goodwin: their wonderful stories, helped me to see Emmett in life. I also thank Heluise Woods for saving her fifty-year old letter from “Bobo.”
Please, when you have a moment, peruse the digital program notes for a fuller acknowledgement of the scholars, artists, institutions and individuals who contributed to my realization of the work. I am indebted and grateful to each and every one of you.
First and last – to Mamie Till-Mobley and to her son Emmett Louis Till, “Bobo,” whose courage and faith continue to inform, enlighten and inspire, words cannot say… The world owes you its debt, and I am but a dweller upon it. I thank you for the privilege of walking with you a ways.
While based on actual events and drawn from historic research, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of a story that in many ways remains a mystery. For dramatic exigency, some characters have been composited, some are fictional and events and times have been condensed.
Acknowledgements
First and last – to Mamie Till-Mobley and to her son Emmett Louis Till, whose courage and faith continue to inform, enlighten and inspire, words cannot say… The world owes you its debt, and I am but a dweller upon it. I thank you for the privilege of walking with you a ways.
I am especially indebted to the African American press, including the Chicago Defender, PittsburghCourier, Ebony and Johnson Publications Jet and Ebony moagazines, for their definitive and comprehensive coverage of Emmett Till’s murder. I began my research here, but it was only the beginning.
While I researched numerous primary resources—news articles, letters, film and photographic archival material—I created this narrative primarily from the first-hand accounts. I wish to thank Emmett’s extended family, all of whom have been most generous with their time, their memories and insight. In Argo, Pastor Wheeler Parker, Jr., Elder Simeon Wright, childhood friends John Goodwin and Turner Goodwin: their wonderful stories, helped me to see Emmett in life. I also thank Heluise Woods for saving her fifty-year old letter from “Bobo.”
In Chicago, Anita Cochran led me to Emmett’s eighth-grade classmates Carole Adkins, Richard Heard, Millicent Conley, James Van Hoose, Barbara Barry, and James Willis, as well as Emmett’s seventh grade teacher Mr. Spears. My appreciation also goes to numerous individuals for sharing experiences of growing up in the fifties. These include Prof. Paul Carter Harrison, Emmons Wallace, Pastor Herbert Martin, Jr., Dr. Victor Leo Walker II and Mary Johnson. Noted scholars Charles Payne, Adam Green and Drs. Linda and David Beito, as well as Davis Houck, deeply enriched my understanding of the Civil Rights Era. To this list of generous souls, who were kind enough to share memories and insights with me, I must add the Mississippi accounts of Mayor Johnny Thomas, Leesha Faulkner, Alison Kelly, C. Aven Whittington, III, and Laura Lee Wallace.
I am eternally grateful to Myrna Colley-Lee and Morgan Freeman for their hospitality and to the of the SonEdna Foundation for sanctuary during my weeks of Mississippi research. I also thank Elmo Terry-Morgan and Karen Allen-Baxter of Rites and Reason Theatre, the arts component of the Africana Studies Department of Brown University and President Ruth Simmons, along with Donald King and Providence Black Repertory Company, for providing the fellowship that made much of my initial research and play development possible.
Special acknowledgement also to the late Marsha Z. West, resident director of Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence, for her staging of the first full reading of Till. I am honored that Jane Saks and Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in Arts and Media at Columbia College awarded me the inaugural fellowship for women playwrights of color.
Many creative colleagues helped me along the way with good counsel and red pencils. These include Sue Lawless and Lorna Littleway at the Juneteenth Festival of New Plays in Louisville; John Wesley and Ben Bradley at Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, and Nena St. Louis in a world of her own. I wish to especially thank director Clinton Turner Davis for his scholarly and directorial
assistance in early readings of the work, Kate Whoriskey for a wonderfully inventive O’Neill Playwrights Conference experience and director/dramaturg Anna Bahow for her faith in the play and in me.
The entire Goodman Theatre staff was superbly supportive of the world premiere of The Ballad of Emmett Till in 2008. Special thanks to Executive Director Roche Schulfer, Artistic Director Bob Falls, General Manager Kathy Murphy and Literary Manager Tanya Palmer. I will be eternally grateful to Peter Bynoe, a trustee at the Goodman and life-long friend, for bringing my work to the theatre’s attention. Since we first met on the steps of Cabot Hall, Peter has been a colleague and constant supporter. Likewise director Oz Scott from our very early days on the Lower East Side of New York. The Goodman marked our first production collaboration since for colored girls. It took far too long.
My thanks also to The Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles for providing the play with its second home and giving me the opportunity to shape the work into the lean and intense ensemble that it is today. Particular appreciation for the sharp eye of director Shirley Jo Finney and the dramaturgical suggestions of Simon Levy.
At the time of his death, January 1, 2010, Fountain Theatre associate producer Ben Bradley was working on my play. Ben was so very excited about this production. I take solace with the thought that he seemed at the height of his joy. He was in the moment, completely absorbed, possessed with a sense of unlimited possibility. Like Emmett, the play’s young protagonist, Ben was breathing the essence of freedom, the greatest joy coming perhaps in the pursuit of happiness even more than in its capture. I ponder now his urgency, yet I am so grateful for it.
Thanks also to Eileen Morris, Artistic Director of Ensemble Theatre of Houston, for bringing The Ballad of Emmett Till to the first Black Theatre and the first venue in the South, and then onto the National Black Theatre Festival.
My gratitude also to Saah Bellamy, Artistic Director of Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, for not only producing The Ballad, but embracing my vision for The Till Trilogy, by being the first theatre to produce Benevolence and bringing me together with the brilliant Talvin Wilks.
To my colleagues at University of Massachusetts Amherst – midwives, mentors and students – Professors Priscilla Page, Harley Erdman, Chris Baker, Megan Lewis and Judyie Al-Bilali, Gina Kaufman and Gilbert in the Theater Department and then Chair of African American Studies Department John Bracey. Particular shout-out to John form bringing Sonia Sanchez as respondent to my first reading of Benevolence. Also, to Christine Hicks, Ryan Jacobucci, Jude Sandy and Mia Ellis as that first cast, who showed me we had a play!
I am indebted to the MacDowell Colony for providing me with a vital residency in the spring of 2022. I see why the place is magical.
My gratitude also to my implacable agent Susan Gurman, always the wind at my back.
To Mosaic Theatre’s new Artistic Director Reginald Douglas for embracing The Till Trilogy as the flagship of his first season, and to Mosaic Theater’s former artistic director, Ari Roth, who first said, “Yes!” My gratitude also to my implacable agent Susan Gurman, always the wind at my back.
This work is about family. I would be nothing without my own – my incredible sisters Bisa and Ntozake and my stalwart brother Paul, my calming Zen niece Savannah and my late and forever great parents Paul T. and Eloise O. Williams. I dedicate this work to the memory of my mother, to the end, my mentor and muse.
The Recommended Plays of the Play Committee for the American Theatre Wing 2022 Gala,, honoring Antoinette Perry & Women in the Theatre, September 12, 2022 at the Cipriani, NYC. With her musical Charleston Olio, nominated by Play Committee member Plylicia Rashad, Ifa Bayeza was among 18 honorees, including Caryl Churdhill, Paula Vogel, Young Jean Lee and Pearl Cleage.
