IFA BAYEZA
THE EBONY INTERVIEW
2008-05-09
By Sergio A. Mims

The 1955 murder of the 14-year-old Chicagoan, Emmett Till was one of the major pivotal points in the civil rights struggle that still reverberates and impacts America today. Award winning playwright, novelist, and conceptual theater artist Ifa Bayeza has spent the last decade writing and shaping her powerful and haunting play, “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” directed by acclaimed film, television and theater director Oz Scott and currently running at The Goodman Theater in Chicago. Recently Ebony had an opportunity to talk to Ms. Bayeza about her play and the impact she hopes her work will have with audiences. 

Ebony: Obvious question first, why create a play about Emmett Till?
Bayeza: Well there are a couple of reasons for me. One, as a playwright one of my main areas of focus has been to chronicle the sacred stories and the scared historic moments for African-American
people and to take those stories and to try to give the epic proportions that the stage can do. I did a piece on the Amistad slave mutiny called “Amistad Voices” which about the Middle Passage and
that first encounter of Africans and this experience we call the New World in America.

I’ve got another piece, “Club Harlem,” about the Harlem Renaissance which is another highpoint of our culture and our attempt to cleave out an identity in this society. And certainly the Civil Rights Movement is another pivotal moment and peak in our history and Emmett seemed a logical starting point for me. One because it is such a significant story and did impact on so many of us. But also because I was a child of the civil rights movement and I came to the Emmett Till story as a child and I had an emotional reaction, child to child. That was the first time I understood vulnerability and that was the first time I understood the perils that young people were put in, including myself, as we became the foot soldiers of integration.

So in pursuing this story I was able to really address that childhood longing that I had to get to know this person. It was as if I had lost a best friend who I never knew. So this process really allowed me to get to know a wonderfully alive and vibrant and quirky human being. And so it was a really personal journey for me to explore this story.

Would you say this play is necessary because so many of our African-American youth know so little about the Civil Rights struggle?
I would say in general that for American youth, including African-American youth yes, but I look at it in a broader context. Yes, they know very little abut the Civil Rights Movement, but they know every little about our racial history; Looking at American history as a multi racial, social experience. And so history is kind of taught in these units that are not connected to each other so the Revolutionary War is taught as the Revolutionary War. The Civil War, if you get up to the Civil War, is taught as that. And you don’t see the role that Africans in the New World have played in the evolution of our democracy.

If you look at the Civil war as the conclusion of the Revolutionary War it’s in a different context. How can you have a democracy and how can you have a preamble which says that all men are created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and have a quarter of your population enslaved? How can you have representative democracy when you have slave owners who have a thousand slaves who in addition to their one votes get 350 more so that they control the balance of power?

If you look at our role, intrinsically within society, it’s a whole different way of understanding history. So there’s not just a disconnect from the Civil Rights Movement, there’s a disconnect from understanding that African people have played a primary role in pushing our democracy towards the promise of itself.

Most people when they think of Till just think about his murder, but your play also deals with his life and the type of person he was. It doesn’t just deal with his brutal murder, but also celebrates his life.
I not only wanted to celebrate his life, I wanted to really examine his life and cast it in a different way. As you mentioned, when we think of Emmett Till we most often think of that profound death mage and his mother’s valiant struggle to seek justice and truth on his behalf . But, despite it being the Emmett Till story, very little was known about him and I not only wanted to celebrate his life but I wanted to examine this thesis I had that he was also an agent of change.

The agent of change that you normally think of is his mother’s decision to have his casket open so that the world could see what was done to her son and the travesty of justice that occurred and the treatment of his killers. But there was very little interest or examination of who Emmett was and to what extent he was a player in this drama and not simply the victim in this drama.

What has been the reaction of audiences during early try outs in stage readings while the work was still in progress, in particular younger people who don’t know the story of Till?
Well it hasn’t been just young people. I was [part of] the Eugene O’Neill Playwright’s Festival this summer and that audience was 99% white and more mature and a lot of them had no particular memory or reference to Emmett. But the overwhelming reaction was surprising to me because of the way we’ve managed to craft his persona. But he’s such an alive and delightful human being that the audience was kind of seduced into him being their hero, it really is the quest of a young hero.

And so when he is attacked, they are experiencing it from a point of empathy that I don’t think they excepted. So it gave white audience members an opportunity to empathize and to understand our struggle from a subjective point of view. And that was unique for them. Several audience members came out that this could start a national conversation about race and said “WOW!” that was beyond what I thought could happen. But they really were just expressing how the play opened them up to approach and begin  to discuss this very sensitive and delicate subject that was been the source of so much strength and brutality, both within our culture.

I should say that people of a certain generation would all know the story about Till in some way if not the details about what exactly happened to him and the changes that it generated.
I’ll give you another funny instance: There were some African exchange graduate students at Brown University, where I got a fellowship in 2004 to develop the work, and I did two readings up
there. Their reaction was really quite interesting because they knew nothing about Emmett Till, they knew nothing about the specific incident in our civil rights history and these were scholars so they knew more generally about some of the beats of the American experience.

And they said, ‘You know we have a hard time understanding African-Americans, but now that we’ve seen your play we understand something more about who African Americans are’ -- that boldness, that sense of possibility, that individuation that we possess. I think that’s what they meant. This was new to them. They were being introduced to African-Americans in a whole new way and I found that to be a fascinating response and an unexpected one

Would it be unfair to call The Ballard of Emmett Till a “challenging” play as some will no doubt do? 
Unfair? No! But it’s a challenge that’s an exciting one. You can have the challenge of an algebra test that you don’t want to take or you can have the challenge of doing something that is unpleasant or you can  have the challenge of finding your personal best in an athletic competition. So it’s a challenge that is fulfilling and rewarding because it allows people to give voice to either experiences that they’ve had, questions that they’ve had and feelings that maybe they didn’t know they had and it gives the ability to start talking to each other about something that’s almost too sensitive to talk about but that we have to as a nation if we to move into a new realm.

Film critic, lecturer and festival consultant Sergio Mims covers all things film from the city that works, Chicago. He is a regular contributor to ebonyjet.com

Check out Ifa’s profile in the June issue of EBONY!

Front page: Poster designed by Kelly Rickert
Photo: Eric Hausman