MERIDIAN, Miss. (AP) - As students at Meridian High School prepare to present the play “Tell My Story: The Death of Emmett Till,” they’re thinking - and feeling - deeply about history.
“This boy is only 14 years old,” said Josh Davis, a 15-year-old freshman who’s playing the role of Emmett Till in the production. “This is an innocent child going down to Mississippi.”
Davis talks about Till with empathy. Till was, after all, just a year shy of Davis’ own age when he was murdered. Davis also plays Till with tremendous maturity, snagging the subtleties of the stutter that Till carried into his teenage years, and recreating the playful, mischievous spirit of a young man moving through those early teen years.
Randy Ferino Wayne Jr., who directs the theater club at Meridian High School, wrote the play “Tell My Story: The Death of Emmett Till.” Wayne is also the band director at Magnolia Middle School and the assistant band director at Meridian High School.
The students will perform the play at 7 p.m. on Nov. 29 and Nov. 30 in the Meridian High School auditorium, Wayne said. Admission is $5 for adults and $2 for students with a school I.D. They’ll also perform early next month for Dramafest, a competition at Mississippi State University through the Mississippi Theatre Association.
Competition rules mean the one-act play must be tightly written.
“When we take it to competition, they only give us 45 minutes,” Wayne said.
Emmett Till, 14, was tortured and murdered in 1955, in Mississippi, after allegedly making advances toward a white woman. He had traveled from Chicago to visit family members in Money, Mississippi. The two white men accused of the murder - and who later admitted to it, according to published accounts - were acquitted by an all-white jury.
“I’ve always been intrigued, fascinated, by the story of Emmett Till,” Wayne said. “You hear a lot of different versions of it, and you have to do your research to get down to the grit of what happened.”
Earlier this year, that research received a powerful update, when an interview with Carolyn Bryant Donham was published in Timothy B. Tyson’s book, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
The book received great attention, including an article this past January by Richard Pérez-Peña, in The New York Times, that zeroes in on a key portion of the text. Pérez-Peña writes:
“The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor - possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode - who has written a book, ’The Blood of Emmett Till,’ to be published.
“In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, ’that part is not true.’”
It’s an admission that Wayne, in a reflective way, weaves into his own play here in Meridian. At one point he positions characters onstage - including Carolyn Bryant Donham - to tell their stories slowly and thoughtfully.
Wayne, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, has a varied artistic background. He was an extra in the film “42,” about Jackie Robinson, and he was also an extra in the film “Woodlawn.” He’s acted in commercials, played the lead role of Curtis Taylor Jr. in the Meridian Little Theatre’s production of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls” and has acted in many other stage plays. He also tap-danced for about 10 years when he was growing up in Bessemer, Alabama.
Now, his work at Meridian High School, where he’s been teaching for about five years, includes helping to develop the theater club - and he has a talented group of students nourishing a passion for performance.
“It’s just amazing to see different people play different roles, no matter what they are,” said junior Tylaia Keeton, who plays Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley. Keeton said she’s been interested in acting since fourth or fifth grade.
Several students, including freshman Krystal Bielefeld, who plays Carolyn Bryant Donham, also noted the power of reconstructing history with a live performance.
“To see it first-hand, to see something like that, is almost taking you back in time,” she said.
Wayne said he’s been moved by the experience of Emmett Till since he was in 10th grade, but he has researched it more intensively over the last two years. A key goal, he said, is to imagine just what it was that people were thinking through the various stages of the action.
That’s clearly something he wants the students to consider. When Wayne directs students, he walks on stage with them, watching them and telling them all of the things that happened that might contribute to how their characters are feeling.
“If it’s something I want drawn out a little bit more . I will put them into that time or frame of mind by giving them a scenario, or giving them a synopsis, of the situation,” he said. “I always tell my students, ’The best way to act is not to act at all. It’s to become whoever you are (portraying).’”
Wayne tells his students to do research, but he also paints the context for a scene from his own knowledge. As he reflected on his work on a recent afternoon, he explained how he approaches the scene in which Emmett Till’s mother gazes with horror into her son’s open casket - an open casket she insisted upon to reveal the travesty of his murder.
“You are standing here,” Wayne recalls telling Keeton, the student playing Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley. “This is your son and your only son. He was 14 years old - as innocent as they come. You know he likes to play a lot of jokes. You know he likes to have fun. You know he likes to play games. And he went down and simply spoke in Mississippi and after the fact they took him from his house…”
And the deeply painful details of Till’s death that Wayne recounts for the students are implied in the play, made palpable by the horrified expression and the cries of Till’s mother.
This is disturbing material for anyone, and perhaps especially for high school students right around Till’s age. But after a recent rehearsal, the students talked about the events calmly and maturely. What seemed to concern them most was the challenge of portraying real, historical people - not made-up characters - as they embodied these figures onstage. They wanted to get it right; they wanted to get the history right.
“This is an actual event out of history,” said senior Ja’Shaun Davis, who plays Moses Wright, “and we have to capture that.”
Part of that challenge involves conjuring an atmosphere of the gloom, of the brutality, that surrounds Emmett Till’s death. As freshman Gregory Melton put it, “The air is heavy.” Melton plays the part of Roy Bryant, one of the men who later admitted to the murder.
Students noted that the events, painful as they are, are part of a history they don’t want people to forget.
“It’s about actually portraying the history that’s going on, good or bad,” said sophomore Kwame Bell, who plays Wheeler Parker.
Harris, as he thought about his performance as Emmett Till, suggested that he wants to bring people into contact with the play’s troubling truths - or to disturb them into thought.
“It won’t sit well with the audience,” Harris said - but that, he added, is part of the task of understanding the history.
“We want them to feel that grim feeling,” he said.
This sort of conversation among the students working on the play occurs frequently, Wayne said.
“They actually talk about it all the time,” Wayne said. “For a lot of them, I exposed them to this because they didn’t know anything about it - which was surprising to me. I said, ’This happened in your state, and you know nothing about this?’”
But once they knew, he said, they plunged into the parts with creative energy - and, on stage, with visible emotion.
For Wayne, that sort of emotional response, from both the actors and the audience members, is something he cherishes. He wants artistic expression, he explained, to be deeply entwined with strong feelings.
“Anything dealing with fine arts, whether it’s music, theater, visual arts, I like to stir up emotion,” he said. “I like to … make you feel all types of feelings that either you’ve never felt before or that bring out a sense of nostalgia.”
And Wayne, like the students, underlined the importance of remembering - and of using historical memories to aid in the journey forward.
“(The audience) will be able to see a moment in time when these things happened in America,” he said. “And in order for these things not to happen again, you have to actually know what happened to begin with.”
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