Toni Morrison Play ‘Dreaming Emmett’ Influenced ‘Beloved’

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The soirée was at the Steuben Club in Albany, a half-hour before the premiere. The gray-haired star of the evening had not been expected to make an appearance. The journalists, politicos, benefactors, and academics in attendance believed that the playwright (who did not consider herself a playwright) would forgo the festivities on account of presumed opening-night jitters. But there she was, wearing a bow-tie scarf and spiked heels, accompanied by her two sons.

“You’re supposed to be nervous,” someone shouted.

“I am,” Toni Morrison replied.

For Morrison, this was a new world—sort of. She was known for her novels, including Song of Solomon, and was hard at work on another that, for the moment, had been set aside. But she wasn’t afraid to dip in and out of other mediums. As a student at Howard University, she acted in Richard III and, more recently, tried her hand at a musical, composing more than two-dozen songs. The production, New Orleans: The Storyville Musical, had not, alas, been a success. Public Theater founder Joseph Papp staged readings in New York City, but that’s as far as it went. The show was never produced, and Morrison didn’t give it pride of place among her works.

Now, at the outset of 1986, the novelist was about to debut her first full-length play. This production was closer to her heart, as it had originated from an incident she’d been thinking about for three decades: the murder of Emmett Till, a Black Chicago teenager who was killed by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam while visiting family in Mississippi. She was excited about the script and did revisions throughout the months of rehearsals. “I thought it was an extraordinary theatrical idea,” she told a journalist that night. “A way to handle history. A way to talk about all sorts of collisions, of fixed ideas and attitudes, collisions of gender, collisions of history, collisions of race, collisions of time, collisions of reality.”

She planned to take Dreaming Emmett to Paris after the initial run.

It was not to be. The theatrical life of Morrison’s freshman outing would begin and end in Albany at the Market Theatre after a four-week run. Copies of the play would disappear. It was rumored—and certainly believed by some involved in the production, that Morrison was to blame for the scarcity. (“After the 1986 production,” according to The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia, edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, she “collected every record of the play and had it destroyed.”) That the play hasn’t been restaged has fueled the idea, fed by Beaulieu’s compendium, that copies no longer exist. Even people involved in the making of the play believed it because Morrison had asked for each copy after the run’s conclusion. However, as I learned while working on my forthcoming book about the 1983 killing of aspiring artist and model Michael Stewart, whose death was a partial inspiration for the play, Dreaming Emmett had not disappeared.

Cast member Joseph C. Phillips saved a copy. According to the author Namwali Serpell, who discovered some of the archival material in this piece while researching her forthcoming book, On Morrison another sits in the Amiri Baraka Papers at Columbia University. Still more, along with multiple drafts and Morrison’s own notes and correspondence, are part of her papers at Princeton University. Although a fire consumed Morrison’s home in Nyack on Christmas Day 1993, singed copies of Dreaming Emmett survived. Yet another few copies materialized thanks to Willa Shalit, who created masks for Dreaming Emmett and, upon learning of the fire, gave her old draft scripts to Morrison.

Five and a half years after Morrison’s death, it’s apparent that, while Dreaming Emmett continues to be little known even among ardent fans of her work, the play is not merely a biographical curio. Scrutiny of the play’s yearslong evolution from idea to premiere offers a rare insight into Morrison’s artistic process, struggles, and insecurities. It may even provide a new understanding of how Beloved, her most celebrated novel, came together.

Morrison first thought of the play in an unspecified airport waiting area, watching a young Black child anticipating a flight. As the boy walked across the room to join his friends, she was struck by his energy and joy. Rather than simply relish his happiness, however, the novelist’s thoughts turned dark. She wondered, as she later put it: “What do you lose when a 14-year-old is killed?”

The killing of America’s Black youth was, for Morrison, top of mind. There were the serial murders in Atlanta of more than a dozen children and young adults from 1979 to 1981, a loss that eventually spurred James Baldwin to write the book-length essay Evidence of Things Not Seen. More recently, there was the death of Michael Stewart in Morrison’s own city. Stewart, a 25-year-old Black man, had been beaten by New York City transit police and died after a 13-day coma. Morrison knew the deaths of Stewart and the children in Atlanta were not the result of their own actions. As she wrote, seemingly to herself, in a note on Random House stationery:

What you did was awful
Not what I did
It’s what I was
If I was white
I’d be alive

By November 1983, two months after the beating of Stewart, Morrison finished the first act of the play. Edward Love, an actor with whom she’d been friends for a few years, likely also gave her some advice on her nascent script. (Love died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991.) While there were recent inspirations for it, she drew primarily from Till’s 1955 murder.

Till was murdered when Morrison was in graduate school at Cornell University. His death, which famously helped catalyze the civil-rights movement, had already appeared at least once in Morrison’s work, in 1977’s Song of Solomon. The protagonist, Milkman, walks into a barbershop and is told that a “young Negro boy had been found stomped to death” in Sunflower County, Mississippi. When men in the shop begin to argue about Till’s culpability in his own death (“Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt”), one advises, “You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.” In reality, no one involved, including Bryant’s wife, Carolyn—whose lie about an encounter with Till instigated the murder of the teenager—would face justice.

Morrison’s idea for her play, then titled Emmett, was to give Till a chance to “return from the dead” and enact his own version of retribution, as she wrote in a letter to her friend Gail Merrifield Papp, the wife of the Public Theater founder. The mechanism for it was a “dream/play,” cast and directed by Emmett himself, that would force his killers to endure a comeuppance the real Bryant and Milam had avoided after a swift acquittal. When Morrison introduces Emmett—functionally a ghost, the age he was at death—he’s spent 30 years dreaming of his own murder and is working on a play. To fill out the cast of this play within the play, he assembles his loved ones and antagonists: Bryants and Milam; Till’s mother, Ma; and two friends from Mississippi named George and Eustace (based, perhaps, on Till’s cousins Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker Jr.). Emmett plans to use the play as an act of vengeance both against his killers but his friends, whom he believes failed to protect him. This was an inherently surreal setup; Emmett takes the opportunity to berate his murderers and reconnect with his mother, all of whom have aged decades. A young Black woman from the present day joins the group from the audience and has her own back and forth with the characters. Her purpose, Morrison told a reporter, was to “act as a kind of chorus.”

This was an audacious idea and not an intuitive one for a theatrical production in 1983. Till’s death hadn’t been a news story in decades—the Bryants were living in quiet infamy, while Milam had died a couple of years earlier. (As Morrison later wrote, “Nothing is deader than a thirty-year-old headline.”) But it would be ideal for a bureaucrat in upstate New York.

Kathryn Gibson, the director of the Capital District Humanities Program at SUNY Albany, had been thinking of ways to commemorate both the state capital’s tricentennial and Martin Luther King Jr. Day—signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and slated for an inaugural observance on January 20, 1986. The answer came during a standing-room-only campus lecture by Morrison, soon to join SUNY Albany’s faculty as Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities. As Gibson sat on the floor, enthralled, she decided that a play by Morrison would be ideal. Gibson had no notion of Morrison’s work in progress. When I asked her recently why it made any sense for a novelist with little theatrical experience to write a play—even a novelist as renowned as Morrison—Gibson said, “It was pure fantasy on my part.”

To make this a reality would require the participation of two other parties: the Capital Repertory Theatre, which had been part of the Albany theater firmament for several years, and the recently created New York State Writers Institute, founded by Ironweed author (and friend of Morrison) William Kennedy. The Capital Rep, the Writers Institute, and the CDHP would, in an unorthodox arrangement, produce the play.

Once a full draft of the play was finished, Tom Smith, who helped run the Writers Institute, and Bruce Bouchard and Peter Clough, the Capital Rep’s co-producing directors, trekked to Morrison’s home, where the novelist read the entire play aloud. “We walked out of there going, Man, if there’s any way we could possibly mount this, it would be one hell of a thing to accomplish,” says Clough. Upon returning to Albany, recalled Bouchard, he and Clough agreed “it was a hallucinogenic hellscape.”

The opportunity to stage the play in progress came at a fortuitous time for Morrison, who was having trouble with her novel in progress. In March 1985, she accepted the offer, and $5,000 from the Writers Institute, to deliver Emmett that June.

In the months that followed, the play was transformed. The Emmett of the original draft still conjured ghosts from his past in order to “set things right,” but the play, now titled Dreaming Emmett, became more complicated. Morrison had once referred to the Bryants and Milam by name, but the former were now Major and Princess, while the latter became Buck. What Morrison had originally described as a “dream/play” was now a movie, darkly titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Morrison’s most drastic change concerned the Emmett character himself: He was not, in fact, Emmett Till but a teenager in Chicago, shot in 1957 by a shopkeeper for stealing a kite. Neither Clough nor Bouchard know what prompted the changes.

“In every way possible, this play should have the quality of a dream,” Morrison would write. “Not dreamy, or dream-like (meaning fuzzy or floating) but the way sustained dreaming really is: sometimes the pace seems to slow down to agonizing lengths; sometimes the movement of speech is oddly rapid.” In practice, Morrison’s revisions had made Dreaming Emmett convoluted and diminished the power of the original idea.

In the fall of 1985, production on Dreaming Emmett began. Morrison, who wasn’t confident about “dramatizing, about linking the word to a visual image,” wanted Gilbert Moses to direct—his track record was undeniable. He co-directed, staged, and choreographed the Bernstein-Lerner musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, won the Obie for Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship, and earned a Tony nomination for Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death. He understood intuitively how vital it was to stage a play written, directed, and starring Black people. “We as blacks are starved for images of ourselves all over this country,” Moses once said. But one could envision friction. A decade earlier, Moses had been fired from The Wiz, the blockbuster musical, and it was rumored he’d assaulted a member of the production. (Moses died in 1995.)

That October, actors filed into the New Dramatists building, a converted church in midtown Manhattan, for auditions to fill eight roles—four with white actors, four with Black actors. Morrison entered the room, smiling broadly, and took a seat at a table with Moses and Bruce Bouchard, Capital Rep’s co-producing director.

Morrison and Moses watched two actors try out for the lead roles of Emmett and Tamara. “Okay, you people,” Moses said, “start whenever you want.” As the young actors performed a scene, the room fell silent.

During a break for lunch, Morrison suggested the actress hadn’t been appropriate for the role. “This Tamara is translating the ghetto sass into anger, and it’s not quite right. The instinct—I’m not sure she has it,” she said. Moses agreed. Morrison continued: “Here it’s too much of that easy, fast way girls have been walking the streets have to have. Tamara has to have a deflective quality, and whatever this one has, it ain’t that!”

On the first day alone, more than 30 actors auditioned. Eventually, the role of Tamara was given to Lorraine Toussaint, a Juilliard graduate who’d been Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Woman Two in Samm-Art Williams’s Home. (She would later go on to co-star in Orange Is the New Black). The New York Times praised Toussaint’s performance in the latter production for its “simplicity and size.”

Joseph C. Phillips was cast as Emmett. At 23, he was noticeably older than the real-life Till. Phillips had acted in a St. Louis production of A Raisin in the Sun and appeared in an episode of The Cosby Show, airing only a week before the audition. He was filled with confidence because the episode garnered tremendous ratings, and that swagger dovetailed perfectly with Morrison’s version of Till.

By the end of the fall, the play was fully cast. For her part, Toussaint was impressed by Morrison’s engagement with the production and recalled that, during rehearsals, “Toni would tell us stories of her nightly struggles with her current novel.” Meanwhile, the mechanics of Dreaming Emmett had gotten more complicated—and expensive—in ways that both threatened to further obscure Morrison’s work and swell Capital Rep’s budget.

Joseph C. Phillips in Dreaming Emmett.
Photo: Skip Dickstein

Producer Bruce Bouchard brought in Dale Jordan, a freethinking, congenial sort, to create an abandoned-cotton-mill set and a chair to transport Emmett around the stage. At first, the scenic and lighting designer experimented with “abstract and bizarre” ideas—including moving the lead actor around on a boom crane—but he’d grown more realistic in his conceptions. Even in its pared-back state, however, Moses demanded an elaborate set. A reporter walking around the production observed its “wheels and pulleys … wooden doors, part of a maze of stained, worn-down machinery,” “dreary corrugated steel,” and broken window panes. “The creative process grew and grew,” said Jordan.

It was as if the director, so used to the budgets of Broadway, could not adapt to more modest expenditures—or the less cutthroat nature of a regional theater company. Moses’s frustrations were felt by the actors, with whom he had an antagonistic relationship. Phillips remembered the aftermath of a particularly severe scolding from the director, after the actor suggested playing a humorous moment less overtly comedic. Moses sternly told Phillips that his input wasn’t welcome. “And I remember looking at him and I just said, Okay, I was your last ally, and now I hate your fucking guts,” says Phillips. Bouchard, too, found Moses to be a poor collaborator: “He did not know how to work with people. He knew how to bully people.”

In all likelihood, Moses—encouraged by Morrison—thought nothing of allotting an estimated $4,000 for a steel track running along the stage, $2,000 for Phillips’s chair, or $1,500 for Till’s custom-made white suit. That fall, another $3,500 went to Willa Shalit, an artist in the Upper WestSide, for a series of masks to be worn in the first act. Grotesque creations, some small, some large, made of latex and wire mesh were meant to present, said Shalit, “different layers of reality.” A friendly face might conceal a murderer. The addition of the masks were likely informed by Morrison’s knowledge of Greek theater from her days at Howard University. “Ancient, alive, and breathing, their features exaggerated, their power mysterious,” Morrison wrote of her novel Tar Baby, published a few years earlier. “All of the characters are themselves masks.”

The creative decisions kept adding to the bottom line. According to an internal memo, the average Capital Rep production for the 1985-86 season cost $27,686. The budget for Dreaming Emmett now exceeded $70,000. The expenses, as well as Moses’s imperiousness, spurred a contentious meeting in early December. Among the attendees were Morrison and Moses, Capital Rep’s Bouchard and Clough, members of the theater company’s board, the Writers Institute’s William Kennedy and Tom Smith, and Kathryn Gibson—whose idea had started it all.

Moses believed that Bouchard and Clough lacked the skills to produce theater, while Morrison felt that Dreaming Emmett was not getting the support it deserved. “This is me that you are trying to quash by not supporting this play,” one attendee remembers Morrison says, and suggested it would be better not to produce the play at all if it weren’t in line with her and Moses’s vision. Morrison was so upset she began to cry.

Everyone involved acquiesced to Moses and Morrison’s increasingly expensive demands. In short order, apologetic letters were sent (“We deeply regret those things which have transpired …”) and additional funds to cover the costs were secured. But the board members, disturbed by the meeting, offered to scrap the production altogether.

Guests at the opening reception believed Morrison wouldn’t attend because of presumed jitters, but she showed up with her sons.
Photo: Times Union

The offer was, of course, rebuffed. Dreaming Emmett opened as planned and was a box-office success. (According to Justin Knudsen, who is working on a history of the Capital Rep, the play had gross revenue in excess of $85,000.) It didn’t seem to matter that the critics were mixed. Variety lauded the writing and staging but found it “redundant, and confusing.” The Times Union complained that the masks “draw too much attention to themselves as does the set.” The Berkshire Eagle found the plot convoluted: “At the end, when all has unraveled, we have nothing solid left to remember or set our minds to rest upon.” Not raves, perhaps, but still—it’s surprising the play hasn’t had more than a staged reading in the nearly 40 years since the Albany run.

It’s difficult, from a present-day vantage, to imagine Toni Morrison unsure of herself. But she had undeniably hot and cold feelings about the play. Sometimes she seemed keen on her creation, discussing a production with an interested party in Paris and, closer to home, shopped the play to Gregory Mosher, the director of Lincoln Center Theater. But there were also periods, even after Albany, when she viewed Dreaming Emmett as unfinished. Was she simply aware of her inexperience as a playwright? Quite possibly this is why she’d engaged a dramaturg in the first place. That awareness—that her mastery of the novel didn’t necessarily transfer to the theater—would explain Morrison’s candor when, turning to Dale Jordan during a rehearsal, she acknowledged her limitations. “I know how to write people—I know how to describe people in writing and words,” she told the surprised scenic and lighting designer. “But to see them standing up, walking around, I don’t know how to do it.”

Maybe so, but Dreaming Emmett, flawed as it is, holds an undeniable power. I’m thinking of Ma’s reaction when Emmett flippantly asks if she cares about him. “Care about you?” she replies to the ghost, inspecting her palms. “What do you see here? Tell me. There’s nothing in them is there? I had my hands full with you, with work with trouble. Now they’re empty.” Or when Emmett asks Major, “So, am I the last Emmett Till?” Not by a long shot, the Roy Bryant stand-in replies. “You wasn’t the first and you ain’t the last. Every time one of you steps out of line, there’s a responsible white man to show you where that line is. We will stop you in alleys; we’ll stop you in the parks. We will stop you on the buses, the subways—anywhere you misbehave.”

Reading that now, I wonder if Dreaming Emmett wasn’t staged again in large measure because white people were simply not ready to pay for such a dose of reality. After all, this was a production that did not sugarcoat its inspiration and intent. The playbill quotes from the dictionary definition of lynching and excerpts a New York Times editorial on the injustice of the Michael Stewart case. Dreaming Emmett was not, as Morrison told a reporter, “an Anacin that takes away the headache.” It takes a real audacity to stage a play on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day arguing that progress on race relations is at best limited, at worst illusory.

Ultimately, Dreaming of Emmett may be important not as a stand-alone work but for how it helped its author.

Prior to Dreaming Emmett, Morrison had been having difficulties with her novel, set during the Reconstruction era. She hadn’t quite figured out the title character, the spirit of a murdered baby girl. As Morrison later wrote to Nikki Giovanni, the work on the play was done “at a time when I could not get her (Beloved’s) voice.” One project began to bleed into the other, and an early outline of the novel in progress revealed a new conception of the spirit. According to Serpell, that planned version of Beloved’s ghost was “much closer in personality and tone to the ghost of Emmett that we see in the play—wise cracking.” That’s not how Morrison would ultimately write the otherworldly Beloved character, but borrowing Emmett’s traits seem to have helped her think through the literary problem.

Morrison knew there wasn’t much of a precedent for a novelist writing a successful play. Even Henry James hadn’t pulled it off, she’d say. Still, the Capital Rep’s publicist was surprised when, shortly before the premiere, Morrison attempted to shield Dreaming Emmett from critical scrutiny. She’d done quite a bit of local and national press to publicize the show, and every seat was sold for the monthlong run. Regional critics had agreed to attend. But so, too, had the critic from Time. At the request of Morrison, the scribe from one of the country’s most influential weeklies was asked to stay away from Albany. The critic understandably refused.

Nevertheless, at the reception before Dreaming Emmett’s premiere, the novelist radiated optimism. She and her pal William Kennedy happily chatted. She introduced her kids to the guests. This is Ford. This is Slade.

If Morrison was nervous, she didn’t show it as she drank in the accolades.

A reporter trailed the playwright as she confidently worked the room, watching as she “picked up her high heels and jumped into the crowd.”

Update: Contributions to the discovery and interpretation of archival material by Namwali Serpell, author of the forthcoming book On Morrison, have been further specified.

Correction: Morrison wrote about the use of masks in Tar Baby in a 2004 foreword to her novel.