Playbill: A petition created by John Jay College student Mya Bishop on Change.org calling for the cancellation of the upcoming world premiere of Emmett Till, A New American Opera has garnered more than 8,000 signatures. The work, which tells the real-life story of the murder of a Black teenager that spurred the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, is currently set to have its world premiere at John Jay College's Gerald W. Lynch Theatre March 23-24.
2 comments:
I heard about this play through the grapevine and I was and am WILDLY disappointed in its production. The fact that the piece centers around the guilt a white woman feels around her silence in Emmet Till’s death is not only catering directly to white guilt, it is tone deaf due to the fact that Emmet Till was lynched because of “offending” a white woman. Utilizing white women’s tears in a play about a 14 year old boy who lost his life because of white women’s tears shows that the writer (a white woman) clearly did not write the piece as a statement for racial equality, rather, she is writing a piece to quell her own white guilt and hurting people in the process. What I didn’t know was that the actor used to play 14 year old Till is a fully grown man with a tenor voice. Black children have historically been adultified to justify extreme violence and brutality towards them, so why would a piece about Till adultify him in that way as he is in the midst of puberty. I think it is interesting that they created a white character to “take the first step forward to break the silence” while there are many real people (Till’s family) who faced real danger in standing up. I’m worried for this piece and I hope that Mary Watkins is right in her belief that this is a faithful representation, but it feels unlikely.
I really can not even fathom how this opera was able to find producers it is truly insane that more than one person thought this was good idea… like no one objected to this. The idea of who profits from trauma and the individual’s use of others stories for the purpose of profit has been sticking out to me recently. I am currently focusing on dramaturgical work for the play “Gloria” by Branden Jacobs Jenkins in Foundations of Drama. The situation of this work is much different. In “Gloria”, an office woman commits a mass murder and the survivors race to produce content on the tragedy. However, it raises interesting points on who should be telling what stories, and what is inappropriate to use as a marketing ploy. Obviously in the case of something like the Emmett Till opera, its never appropriate for someone to tell the story in this way. It is really tone deaf.
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