The Ballad of Emmett Till
The saga of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, an African-American lad from Chicago, is a horrific footnote to the always-remembered civil rights fight of Black-Americans. His brutal murder at the hands of rabid and radical right-wing fanatics in Mississippi in 1955 gave an emotional face to an American wrong.
The facts of his life, coupled with the lad’s personality, are well-documented in this recently-revised play by Ifa Bayeza. The heart-breaking production, well orchestrated by veteran director Shirley Jo Finney, using a five-actor ensemble, reminds us what happened fifty-five years ago when this lively young man was so viciously murdered.
Till had developed a stutter early in life – which he could control by whistling – a fact that led to a misunderstanding that he had made some kind of an advance to a white woman, clearly an executionable act in the ill-bred Deep South.
Baveza and Finney’s concept is to have the five black actors portray all the characters in their play, white-folk included. Using music of the era and full characterizations, the ensemble (Lorenz Arnell, Bernard Addison, Karen Malina White, Rico E. Anderson and Adenrele Ojo) are adept at making these people, of Chicago and of Mississippi, alive and hearty. The interplay between them creates an authentic place and atmosphere on an essentially bare unit-set, whether it’s driving in a car, reacting to the humid heat of the South, portraying the black family who had Emmett down for the summer, the white female clerk who informed the local KKK of Till’s “insult,” the killers and the killing, the church and gospel-singers, etc. A lovely staging of a horrific act of brutal hatred by ignorant and dangerous folk.
Arnell plays Till; smaller than the stocky lad actually was, he has nonetheless captured a life-loving exterior, bred of one who was a breech-birth, who had had polio as a child, and suffered from his complex stuttering. The other actors wonderfully portray his mother, grandmother, uncles and cousins, along with the white-folk who killed him. It’s a harrowing evening of theatre, an hour-and-a-half without intermission and very much worth seeing.
THE BALLAD OF EMMETT TILL runs through March 20th, 2010 at the intimate and comfortable Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Avenue, a block east of Normandie, in Los Angeles. For tickets: 323.663.1525 or www.fountaintheatre.com.