10 Questions for Ifa Bayeza

- By Franchesca Viaud

© Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a performance essay), my very first play was in the sixth grade: “The Mummy’s Curse” was a comedy about the two British archaeologists who plundered, i.e. discovered, Tutankanen’s tomb. I guess my interest in the intersections of race, culture and history was information even then. As was the palpable nature of spirit, in my understanding of the world and reality. Did you know all the lights in Cairo went out the day that sepulcher was opened?

What writers or works have influenced the way you write now?
That’s a tough one. I do so much historic work, and, to the extent that I can, I like to use first-voice testimony or recounting of experience and archival materials of the period, as in newspapers, letters, journals, recordings, those are my first influences. They said the timbre of the work, the style.

For instance, in The Ballad of Emmett Till, the scene from the carnival derives from Emmett‘s actual letter written to a girl named Heluise Woods in May 27, 1955. It’s the only document I found, outside of his few letters to his mother, that are in his voice. I discerned everything about his character from that. His sense of style, desire to impress, speech pattern, interest in girls, intentionality.

Earlier primary influences Thorton Wilder’s Our Town which I read at 12 over the summer. Realizing that all I needed was a blank stage and from that, any dramatic idea could be portrayed fascinated me, so I would say the first page of that manuscript was a fundamental building block of my style. In high school, Peter Brooks’ The Persecution and Assassination Of Jean Paul Marat as Portrayed by the Inmates of Charendon and Written by The Marque de Sade, which was playing on a Wednesday matinee, changed my life. My sister and I played hookie and took a trip to New York. The multiple layers within that production, the capacity to explore difficult and disturbing, political ideas, permission to allow the full humanity of characters however flawed as an insane, sadistic, that play in its complexity, the many different layers of place and time and personae constantly shifting definitely influenced the evolution of my style. Reading Paul Carter Harrison‘s Drama of Nommo at Harvard (while not on any reading list), with its emphasis on ritual and the importance of sound, its reverberating impact, solidified my commitment to theater as my chosen focus of creativity. My sister Ntozake Shange certainly influenced me, but in a way probably different from everybody else. In her fierceness and courage and determination, she was a model for me. Her absolute faith in her own voice was a model for me. I guess because we’re siblings, though, I didn’t want to go anywhere near her stylistic choices. You will never see anything that looks like a choreopoem in my work. The distinctions are clear to me. I love dialogue. I like when characters talk to each other. While I employ soliloquies within my work, they always feed into a scene of dialogue. While I greatly admire the power of her language, I had no interest or intention of going anywhere in that direction. I am a playwright, I would say, not a poet. Ruby Dee first schooled me. She took my face into her soft palms and said, “My dear, you can be both.”

While I am impressed and moved by many artists, many different genres—Percival Everett, Octavia Butler, Tony Morrison, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Zora, Langston … I went through a Doris Lessing phase and Ursula LeGuin, now stuck on Colson Whitehead. Edwidge Danticat: I read everything of hers I can get my hands on. Dominique Morriseau’s exquisite construction of plot and her ear for dialogue, the grounding power of place; Suzan Lori Parks’ is kind of abstract constructions, the reductive nature of her prose I find exquisite. I am influenced by other creative genres, music of all forms, most recently Jason Moran and Carlos Simon, Amina Claudine Meyers, David Murray; visual artists, the conceptual dialogue of visual artists: Dawoud Bey, Makelena Thomas, Candace Hunter, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall. Dawoud’s Underground Railroad series, and the haunted edifices sugarcane industry, the wind. How he captures the spirit in the interplay of shadow and light, capturing in the now these gateways for us to dance with the past. Family, first and foremost, has influence. I come from a family of storytellers , and the water is run deep. My grandmother used to make us sit quietly whenever it thundered. She would say, “Be still. God is talking,” and to this day, I sit to hear what he has to say. And I never met a better storyteller in my life than my mother Eloise Owens Williams. My father Paul Towbin Williams, M.D., was good, but a distant second. Still, I never met his match in maxims. “Always have a sense of humor.” “You must never be a servant, but you must always serve your people.”

What other professions have you worked in?
Tangentially, various education positions. My very first summer job in high school was as a teacher’s aide at a migrant camp. Most recently I was Senior Lecture and Distinguished Artist in Residence at Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies. I’ve had various jobs in television, writing and a couple of arts administration positions. Education director at Court Theater in Chicago many, many moons ago. For a brief seven years I ran a youth art center, our little Black Bauhaus called the Chernin Center for the Arts on Chicago’s west side. For the most part, however, all of these positions were predominantly to support my ambition as a writer. I was always scribbling with a job on the side.

What did I want to be when I grew up?
I was always making things as a child; however, I didn’t think of a creative field as a profession I suppose because it was so much a part of who I was. I was a very physical child back then, so for a while, I wanted to be a gymnast, And I was very fast. My sixth grade gym teacher wanted to train me for the Olympics, but that plan was curtailed when I lapped the boys, and it was determined that my prowess was too threatening to their developing a healthy masculine sense of self, so they took me off the track team. With my mother’s collusion, but that’s another story! 5.

What inspired me to write this piece?
An apparition I was working on the second episode of at work entitled Homer G & the Rhapsodies in the Fall of Detroit, my treatise on the collapse of big car American civilization and the fracturing of the Black segregated community upon the infestation of crack cocaine. When episode one received a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays awards, I got very excited about starting episode two. I was working on a scene from that piece when the patriarch of the family, Priam in Troy who became Prime in modern day Detroit. Rambling home, drunk on a Friday night, paycheck in his pocket, he is haunted by the memory of seeing his dead son in the morgue, trying to escape that image, that memory, in drink. Bombastic and cussing out anybody who bumped into him in the street, hating to go home and having to climb those steps back to the reality of his sorrow, he sees on the telephone wire above an apparition. Slightly Egyptian its construct, birdlike in shape, but human in self-awareness, and it says to him, “Bear witness.” The creature so frightens him that he runs away and it flies after him. At every juncture where he stops. falling into the gutter, running through a tunnel, it would appear. It just pursues him with these two words, “Bear witness, bear witness.” It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, and I ask, “Bear witness to what?” Then it came to me that he had been a witness in the murder of Emmett Till and had not come forward. The next morning, I took myself to the library to review the Till murder case, to see what information I might glean that might help me figure out Prime’s back-story. I spent an afternoon at the Schomburg , reviewing microfilm of the Chicago Defender and discovered that there were Black witnesses. Then I read the Look magazine confession of Till’s killers. There were so many discrepancies and so many questions unanswered, I was shocked. I had thought that I knew this story, when I obviously didn’t know it at all. It came to me then that this entity was not beseeching my fictional character, but beseeching me. Thus began my journey.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
This is interesting. No and sort of. Movement is a signature of my writing. I did not have the fate of association with a singular place. My life, particularly my early life was characterized by movement from one place to another, from one culture to another, one school to another, from one physical environment to another, and among all of my siblings because of how my life fit into that movement, I had the least grounding, the least time, in any one of these multiple settings to which my family moved in my youth. So from Trenton, New Jersey to Samson Air Force Base in New York, back to Trenton and from there to St. Louis. In St. Louis, from the uber-segregated St. Louis to a sparsely integrated school in St. Louis, then back to suburban New Jersey. I bounced around more schools, every one a new world. My adult life pattern followed suit. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New England, now the DMV. This experience of movement established the tropes or rhythms of my character, its content. My relation to place I have tried to use as a plus. The stories to which I am drawn are stories of journeys because I have been on one all my life. That may be why I am drawn to explore the movement of Africans in this New World through time and place. I see the whole landscape as my place.

Music?
I mostly need quiet. And I confess, I very often listen to film scores as they are rhythmic and symphonic in their richness. I do like new age tracks that sound to me like outer space. Whatever it is cannot be too melodic or rhythmic or meditative. It has to drive without repetition. So I’ll hunt around. Spotify, Pandora. Early morning birds I love. Rain. Wind. And thunder. That’s the best.

Rituals?
Especially if I’m doing historic characters, I make an altar asking permission to hear their story, to tell their story, thanking them for their lives, promising to do my best. I smudged the room with white sage, which is good to clear out anything that doesn’t belong there. I clean the desk and order my house, I go for a walk and let the energy settle around me. Ideas and sentences and images come at all hours, at any time, so I always keep a pad beside me. Beside my bed, in my pocket. Having forgotten far too many, I want to be ready to catch that phrase whenever and however it comes. When I’m in the midst of a project, I try to write on a particular schedule with a list of things I want to accomplish in that time. Generally, it’s a scene. 12 to 6 is good. At six, I stop and always leave a little something to kick off the next day, a point of excitement so you enter the next writing day with the same enthusiasm. The first read is aloud to myself. I record on my phone and then suffer the listening back because it always tells me what more I have to do. I do my second read with friends who know me or know my style and their field.

If I could work in another art form?
I already do. I’ve written three musicals now and I make my storyboards for all of my plays. Like Tina, I’m a private dancer. Gotta have it. Movement!

What am I working on now?
It’s like I’m back in graduate school with a full course load. The Till Trilogy, I just finished editing. Finally, it’s being published by TRW (Theatrical Rights Worldwide). All three plays: The Ballad of Emmett Till, That Summer in Sumner and Benevolence. I am also polishing my essay, “Walking with Emmett,” so that I can codify and preserve some of my interviews and the primary research that I did.

Also, I am on the final stages of a commissioned work as part of the Generations Now Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation. A consortium of five theaters Children’s Theater Company of Minneapolis, the Latino Theater Company and Native Voices in Los Angeles. Theater Mah-I in New York, and Penumbra Theater St. Paul will be commissioning in total 16 new plays for multigenerational audiences, filtered through the specific missions and unique cultural identities of each of the participating theaters. My play, which is being produced by Penumbra and CTC is One Small Alice, a fugitive slave narrative of a young girl who has to make her way to freedom on her own. We have a reading coming up at the Kennedy Center’re doing our first read this October and it’s finally ready. I think to get a production date so that’s what I’m working on now get ready for October and for an August 24 reading at the Kennedy Center in August and another in October at CTC. Then we will set the date for production. Lastly, two of my musicals are one step closer to production.

Bunk Johnson … a blue poem is set for a reading at Arena Stage with the magnificent Wendell Pierce playing Bunk, and KID ZERO is going into development at Center Stage in Baltimore. I’m also editing a memoir of sorts, zee and me, chronicling our childhood and literary coming of age, the dance of siblings, our intertwine, creative paths, conversations that we had and those that we could not.

IFA BAYEZA is an award-winning playwright, director, composer and educator. Her plays include the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award-winner Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit; String Theory; Welcome to Wandaland; Infants of the Spring; the musicals: Charleston Olio; Bunk Johnson . . . a blues poem, Kid Zero; and The Till Trilogy (The Ballad of Emmett Till, That Summer in Sumner, and Benevolence), winner of the prestigious Roy Cockrum Award. Her debut novel, Some Sing, Some Cry, was co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange. In 2018, Bayeza was the inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities and receieved two commissions from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A 2022 MacDowell fellow and 2024 Theater Resident at the Kennedy Center, she is a graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Theater from University of Massachusetts Amherst.