Benevolence
it is an ordinary day
weekday
wednesday
late august
already hot
in the dark
before dawn
two couples
prepare
to face the day
and each other
Benevolence is the third play in The Till Trilogy, exploring the epic saga of Civil Rights icon Emmett Louis Till, the Chicago teenager whose fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 is believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
The drama for four actors explores the transformation in the Mississippi Delta in the wake of Emmett’s death, the toll of the legacy of enslavement on the smallest units of our society, the family and individual. From the eyes of two women and the men in their lives, it is an intimate play, a tale of love and loss. Like the land in its time, Benevolence is segregated. Act I is white. Act II is black. In each world, the other is present, but invisible.
Reviewers Weigh In…
“Tectonics shudder underneath Bayeza’s new play—slowly breaking open into those fabled dimensions. We register the cultural fallout of Till’s death through conflicts separately besetting a black couple and the white Bryant couple. No actor plays Till. No direct representation of him appears onstage. Instead, he becomes Carolyn’s ghost. He becomes the black couple’s crucible.” — Minnesota Monthly
“As “Benevolence” transitions to the second act, with Till’s murderers escaping justice, it’s impossible not to connect this crime to more recent killings of young black men such as Philando Castile and Trayvon Martin and wonder: Who, exactly, should be indicted? The killers? The system that created them? Do you go all the way back to the people who ripped Africans from their homes and sold them?” — Star Tribune
“Bayeza has written a powerful work of theater, whether considered as a pair of closely linked one-acts or a whole. The lessons from our past continue to send out tendrils that weigh upon our present. Painful as they may be to witness, the cost of not heeding those lessons is certainly far greater. benevolence is an essential addition to the documentation of and rumination on our bloody national narrative.” —Talkin’ Broadway