Review: "The Ballad of Emmett Till"

Los Angeles, California – Back in 1955, a feisty bright Chicago boy decided to join his uncle visiting kin down south, helping out on the farm, meeting some cousins, just having some good summer fun. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black kid, full of life, full of talk. Couldn’t stop him from talking, he took in so much of the world around him.

In spite of warnings, he couldn’t conceive of the violence of race relations in Mississippi. He was headstrong and a joker. Shopping in a grocery store, without thinking, he whistled at a white woman. And soon, at night, white men came and pulled him from the house, beat him, tortured him horribly, and finally killed him. This horrific episode brought the beginning of the civil rights movement. What they did to a 14-year-old boy, his mother refused to hide away. She insisted on an open coffin so all the folk could see what happened. And finally the world of concern rose up.

The story has been many times portrayed. This production, written by Ifa Bayeza, begins slowly, with dance, poetry, and a lovely dramatic portrayal of a happy family. A sense of love, connectedness, and the buoyant spirits of an adolescent boy take up the largest part of the one-act play so that when the final violence descends, it so shocks and stirs the heart and works so well, it’s not only a must-see, it’s a must experience that hits you in the gut. In fact, on the night I saw it, the young man who played Emmett came stumbling out after that final scene, so sweated, so shaken, you could see that he played out his heart in that role.

And there are only a few more weeks to see it at the Fountain Theater. It closes end of the month.

Aside from the beautiful ensemble performance, there is a piece of history which needs to be retold. In these days, when our president is black, with the expectation that race relations are finally resolved, we still, in American politics, have glimmers of anger and simmering resentment. Old hatreds die hard. Interesting that a British mystery, Foyle’s War, tackles the implacable hatred of that period in an episode where black soldiers are waiting for a ship home back in England, and the very men they fought with on the field of battle, at the request of a southern racist, decide to segregate the men. A powerful episode.

It’s a dramatic performance not to miss. The ensemble cast — Bernard Addison, Rico Anderson, Lorenz Arnell, Adenrele Ojo and Karen Malina White — play a seamless one-act.

Don’t miss this excellent presentation.