“The Ballad of Emmett Till”
Written by Ifa Bayeza
Showing: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, through June 1
Tickets: $42-$70
Contact: (312) 443-3800; goodmantheatre.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

Had he been granted the full life we deserve from birth, Emmett Till would be 67 today. Certainly, he never wanted to become a martyr for civil rights (something this play occasionally forgets), any more than Matthew Shepard wanted to die for the “gay agenda.”

In 1955 this Chicago kid, whose occasional stutter revealed the effects of a bout with polio, just wanted to enjoy his 14th summer visiting relatives in Mississippi, picking cotton to pay for his stay when he wasn’t fishing, dancing and, yes, drinking. But when he supposedly gave a white woman the wolf whistle, the vacation turned to hell. Emmett was kidnapped from his grand-uncle’s shack, tortured and beaten until unrecognizable, then tossed into the Tallahatchie River. In a six-day trial his white murderers were acquitted because, besides the fact that the victim was a black Yankee, the body was never identified. (The prosecution cynically suggested that the NAACP, intent on stirring up enmity between blacks and whites, had substituted another corpse. The jury bought the absurdity!)

Intermittently powerful but overlong and unfocused, Ifa Bayeza’s near three-hour recreation of the crime and its consequences works hard to contrast the easygoing, culturally independent South Side neighborhood that Emmett knew with the reflexively racist, Jim Crow towns of Money and Greenwood, Mississippi. Joseph Anthony Byrd’s cocky, confident, irrepressible Emmett resents his mother Mamie’s advice to “be respectful.” His taste for excitement overrules restraints. Tragically, Emmett’s untamed exuberance results in a human sacrifice.

Author Bayeza tells the tragedy from all sides, even seeking to understand the conflicted white woman whose accusation dooms Emmett. A ton of solid research went into this stirring recreation. Bayeza’s down-home dialogue both drives home Emmett’s essential innocence and exposes the cultural misunderstandings that build to disaster.

Unfortunately, the presence of so many perspectives means this sprawling script often lacks a point of view. Oz Scott’s staging is equally overly generous, delivering warm portrayals such as Deidrie Henry’s Mamie, a mother full of protective passion and, ultimately, enough dignity to shame any enemy. (She insisted on an open casket to show the world what the racists did to her son. Oddly, though the torture is repeatedly depicted, the many projections in this play never include the famous one of the mangled face,)

Like the play, Byrd’s Emmett is wildly inconsistent as he lurches from a rambunctious Chicago kid to a ghost-like interrogator at his murder trial and finally to a triumphant spirit screaming how he’ll live forever. By romanticizing and beatifying Emmett, Bayeza robs him of his power to haunt us with what might have been. Fifty-three years later, Emmett Till is remembered because he was cut off early, not because he was destined to die.