Get the latest gossip
Toni Morrison’s Lost Play
Why did the novelist’s only staged drama disappear for so long?
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. 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. 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.
Or read this on VULTURE