Meet Ifa Bayeza, Playwright of THE TILL TRILOGY

Playwright of The Till Trilogy, Ifa Bayeza.

Playwright Ifa Bayeza has dedicated much of her creative life to bringing the story of Emmett Till to the stage. This fall, Mosaic presents her opus, The Till Trilogy, three plays celebrating the Civil Rights icon. The trilogy includes world premiere That Summer in Sumner, and reunites Bayeza with director Talvin Wilks, who previously directed her plays The Ballad of Emmett Till and Benevolence.  

Meet Ifa Bayeza, who recounts first encountering Till in the pages of Jet and her path to creating The Till Trilogy

See one play, two, or all three. Plays in The Till Trilogy can be seen in any order, or individually as a standalone theater experience.

Buy tickets here.

THE TILL TRILOGY by Ifa Bayeza Running October 4 – November 20 at Mosaic Theatre Company in DC

Mosaic 2022-23 The Ballad of Emmett Till

The Ballad of Emmett Till

That Summer in Sumner  (world premiere)

Benevolence

THE TILL TRILOGY: The Ballad Of Emmett Till
By Ifa Bayeza | Directed by Talvin Wilks
October 4 – November 20, 2022
With music and magic, Ifa Bayeza’s Edgar Award-winning drama recounts the last two weeks of Emmett Till’s life on his journey from Chicago to Money, Mississippi in 1955. We meet a young man with boisterous energy and boundless charm whose fateful encounter with Caroline Bryant changes his life and our country forever.

 

You have a Standing Invitation!

WHERE: MOSAIC THEATER CO. OF DC, 1333 H St NE, Washington, DC 20002

WHEN: October 4th — November 20th, 2022

TICKETS: boxoffice@atlasarts.org  (202) 399-6764

The Till Trilogy Tickets Now on Sale at Mosaic Theatre Company

Hear Mosaic Artistic Director Reginald L. Douglas, Till Trilogy director Talvin Wilks and playwright Ifa Bayeza, and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton talk about our season-opening production.

The first production of our 2022-2023 season is on the horizon! The Till Trilogy will be on stage OCT 4 – NOV 20. This gripping start to the season features three epic plays by Ifa Bayeza staged simultaneously, in rotating repertory, for the very first time. Tickets to The Till Trilogy are now on sale! Purchase by AUG 12 to save 50% on tickets with code SAVE50. The Till Trilogy honors the legacy of Emmett Till and the ongoing fight for racial justice in America told through three plays—The Ballad of Emmett Till, Benevolence, and the world premiere of That Summer in Sumner. Directed by the renowned Talvin Wilks, Emmett Till’s story is told through music, poetry, and imagination.

Buy tickets here.

‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ directed by Khalia Davis, Gets its First Stage Adaptation for Young Audiences—and it’s Breathtaking

Cherrye J. Davis in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Credit: Rebecca J. Michelson for New York City Children’s Theater, 2022.

Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has already been adapted for both film and stage, but New York City Children’s Theater’s world-premiere production at Theatre Row is the first stage adaptation for young audiences. And it’s positively wonderful.

Director, Khalia Davis

You don’t have to be a member of that young audience to enjoy it, though. With a script taken directly from Angelou’s text (courtesy of Idris Goodwin and Janna Segal), it’s certainly not dumbed down or overly sanitized. In fact, it even comes with a content warning, though its triggering content is still relatively tame. Directed by Khalia Davis, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is lyrical, powerful, and deeply engaging: a beautiful introduction and/or tribute to Maya Angelou’s groundbreaking work.

Much of the credit for this goes to Cherrye J. Davis, who, in just one hour, embodies Angelou’s boundless energy and peoples the stage with characters both loveable and laughable. As Angelou, Davis recalls the day she first arrived in Stamps, Arkansas at a young age after her parents separated. She recounts stories of her grandmother–who owned the general store that serves as the production’s backdrop–her brother, her crippled uncle, the woman who fostered her love of poetry, the poor white children who lived nearby, and others. Her carefree childhood jars to a halt when her absentee father visits and takes Angelou to live with her mother. After the trauma of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Angelou doesn’t speak for a year. Eventually she returns to Stamps, where Mrs. Flowers, a wealthy Black woman, takes an interest in Angelou and, by encouraging her to memorize poetry, finally brings her out of her shell.

Clearly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings deals with heavy subject matter: parental neglect, child rape, poverty, racism. In one taut scene, Angelou’s uncle hides in a box of potatoes and onions to evade the Ku Klux Klan. In another equally tense moment, a group of uncouth white trash children gang up on her grandmother. But while these matters are never glossed over, the overarching mood is not one of despair or anger. Rather, as Angelou reviews her past, both the good and the bad, she savors memories of her grandmother’s strength, her brother’s beauty, Mrs. Flowers’ kindness, her own early passion for Shakespeare, and the excitement of listening to a boxing match on the radio–in a packed general store, with the sound all the way up so people on the porch can hear.

Without relinquishing the gravity required by the play’s darker moments, Davis gives a performance full of youthful joy and profound love. Inhabiting the stage with as much force as grace, she guides us on an emotionally resonant journey through one woman’s early memories. In doing so, she creates a poignant if imperfect world: a place worth living in for the courage and strength of good people, for the intransigent beauty of relationships, and for the chance to make everything a little better.

‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ runs at Theatre Row through June 5. Tickets are pay what you can. For more information, click here.

Read the full article by Erin Kahn for Stage Buddy here.

The World Premiere of We declare you a terrorist… Raises Relevant Questions on War

Tim J. Lord’s play at Round House Theatre depicts a fictionalized account of the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, but echoes the current crisis in Ukraine.

Tim J. Lord

Tim J. Lord, the playwright behind We declare you a terrorist …, now playing at Round House Theatre, could not have anticipated the political context and baggage around the show’s world premiere. It’s a fictionalized account of the 2002 Moscow hostage crisis, during which Chechen terrorists took control of a theater until Russian authorities pumped the space full of gas. The play’s protagonist is from Ukraine, and characters debate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the country, halfway through his first official term. The current war in Ukraine adds some sting to the dialogue, but even without the war, this would be a tough political drama that raises important questions about how different people find purpose in violent struggle.

Co-directors Ryan Rilette and Jared Mezzocchi, along with scenic designer Lawrence Moten, start with a deceptively simple space. It is an anonymous room with beaten up furniture—one character describes it as a kind of purgatory. It’s a year after the hostage crisis and the action begins with an interrogation. An FSB officer (Elliott Bales) pulls a black hood off another man (Cody Nickell) with bound wrists, and starts asking questions. Before anyone can speak, sounds of someone being tortured happen offstage.

The FSB officer uses the frightening sounds and disorientation to his advantage: He is off-putting, almost jovial (none of the actors speak in Russian accents, which is the right choice). You may know that the FSB is modern Russia’s successor to the KGB, so this officer is familiar with interrogation tactics. It turns out his prisoner wrote the play that was being performed when hostages were taken, and after surviving, the playwright was caught trying to enter Chechnya. We eventually learn why, but not just through the officer’s questions. In flashbacks to the hostage crisis, the playwright converses with a Russian teenager, Masha (Bekah Zornosa), and Kayira (Ava Eisenson), a Chechen terrorist. Both admonish the playwright and serve as his conscience.

Ava Eisenson (Kayira), Cody Nickell (The Writer), and Bekah Zornosa (Masha) in “We declare you a terrorist...” at Round House Theatre. Photo by Margot Schulman Photography.
Ava Eisenson (Kayira), Cody Nickell (The Writer), and Bekah Zornosa (Masha) in “We declare you a terrorist…” at Round House Theatre. Photo by Margot Schulman Photography.

The major flourish in We declare you a terrorist involves the nature of the flashbacks. Zornosa and Eisenson do not physically appear on stage. Instead, we see video projections of them on the walls, while Nickell reacts to them in real time. It is an eerie effect, and has a purpose beyond delineating flashbacks from the present. The images of Zornosa and Eisenson are literally larger than life, projected to roughly the size of a movie screen, so their expressive faces only need small changes in order to communicate a great deal. Russian brutality shapes how their characters think, albeit in opposite ways, and the tensest scenes are an extended argument over Kayira’s tactics. She may have a gun and a bomb strapped to her, but the hostage crisis has plenty of downtime, which gives them ample time to pore over the efficacy of terrorism.

If the flashbacks are about the Russian state’s influence over its people, the interrogation scenes are an extension of the government’s will. The dynamics between the playwright and FSB officer are similar to Taking Sides, a 1995 play set in World War II’s aftermath where an American soldier tries to decide whether a German conductor has Nazi sympathies. Both plays conclude that the answers are nowhere near as simple as the interrogator wishes, and the mere act of detaining an artist curdles any possibility that someone such as a conductor or a playwright might remain a friend of the homeland. Bales’ physically commanding performance is all about needling Nickell’s character, and they are effective sparring partners. (Bales flubbed some lines at the production City Paper attended, but he effectively improvised his way through them.) Their dialogue turns into an intellectual battle of wills, another smart choice since onstage depiction of violence and torture would get in the way of Lord’s deeper themes. The officer has his reasons for joining the FSB, just like Masha and Kayira, to the point that every character, including the playwright, become an avatar for one possible path toward unhappiness and despair under the Putin regime.

Lord declines to name Nickell’s playwright character, although a simple Wikipedia search reveals him to be Georgi Vasilyev. By keeping his name semi-anonymous, Lord can take more liberties with the character’s choices and conduct. Absent any strong connection to Vasilyev, Nickell has the freedom to tackle a tricky role, one where the playwright empathizes with three people who hate him for wildly different reasons. His use of understatement is consistently effective, conveying subtle shifts between terror and curiosity, and more importantly, it is dramatically plausible that the other three characters feel comfortable confiding in him. The playwright’s tools are modest: he knows how to ask questions, and has a sense of humor. He may be lucky insofar that Masha and Kayira have opinions about art, although the play also suggests these shared interests, not politics, are where common ground can exist.

Because of its setting and the play is a world premiere, I was curious how We declare you a terrorist… would involve the audience. In an earlier draft, perhaps Lord imagined some kind of interactive theater, with a terrorist character shouting directly at the audience. That tactic would be immediately shocking, then lose its power. Ultimately, Lord does make use of a theater full of attentive listeners. At a crucial moment, the lights turn up and Nickell addresses the audience, his voice full of solemnity and regret. The implication is that we are the dead from the 2002 crisis, a powerful gambit that breaks down several barriers. If the original intent was to disabuse us from thinking about terrorism and totalitarianism in abstract terms, then a secondary, more immediate effect is how this play changes the way we think about the war in Ukraine—and why both sides fight.

We declare you a terrorist…, by Tim J. Lord and co-directed by Ryan Rilette and Jared Mezzocchi, runs at Round House Theatre until May 8. 

Article by Alan Zilberman for the Washington City Paper here.