Playwright Ifa Bayeza, author of The Ballad of Emmett Till, joins host Stephen Sachs on Theatre Talk on Thursday, August 27th @ 4pm PT/7pm ET. The night before our special livestream reading of the play.
Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning theatre artist and novelist. Her critically acclaimed drama The Ballad of Emmett Till premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2008 and was awarded the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play. The West Coast premiere at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles garnered six Ovation Awards, four Drama Desk Critics’ Circle Awards and the Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting. Bayeza has expanded the epic Civil Rights saga in three distinct dramas, The Till Trilogy, which will debut at Mosaic Theatre Co. of DC in June 2021. Other innovative works for the stage include Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit (Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award); String Theory; Welcome to Wandaland, A Fictional Autobiography and the original musicals Charleston Olio, Kid Zero and Bunk Johnson-LIVE-at The Shadows, commissioned by The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Bayeza also co-authored with her sister Ntozake Shange, the "gorgeous" (NY Times), "magical" (Elle), “dazzling” (Essence) novel, Some Sing, Some Cry, chronicling 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women. A graduate of Harvard University with an MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was recently named inaugural Humanist-in-Residence at the National Endowment for the Humanities. With her new adaptation of Shange’s a photograph, lovers in motion, Bayeza made her NY directing debut in January 2020 with a production by The Negro Ensemble Company. She is a finalist for the 2019 Francesca Primus Prize.