Goodnight, Tyler by B. J. Tindal (review)

It is an event that recurs in the United States with almost ritual consistency: police kill an unarmed black person, people circulate images of the person and sometimes videos of the actual killing on social media platforms, activists call for police reform as protests materialize, and ultimately the event fades from news cycles—even as the families of those killed must go on existing with an unbearable hole in their lives and communities. B. J. Tindal’s new play, Goodnight, Tyler, which received its world premiere production at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2019, draws on traditions of black theatre to investigate this cycle and reveal the fissures between public mourning and private grief, inviting audiences to consider how practices of public mourning and memorialization can elide both the individual killed and the structural conditions that led to their death.

While the big idea of police brutality inflects the entire play, the plot itself is decidedly more intimate. Immediately following his death, Tyler (Travis Turner) returns in ghost form to the apartment he shared with his roommate, Davis (Alex V. Gibson). Tyler tells Davis that the police shot him and describes witnessing his own lifeless body lying on the pavement. He saw himself in that moment as he suspects the police saw him, and as he fears the public will see him: “big, ashy, dark.” Tyler begs Davis to ensure that he is remembered for who he really was and not just as a hashtag, which sets up the fundamental conflict of the play: in memorializing Tyler’s life, is it more important to emphasize his individuality, or to recognize that it was his fungibility as a black man in the United States that caused his death?

Tyler’s friends, all of whom are white, assert that he is not that kind of black man—not the kind who gets shot by police. In flashbacks, we see Tyler’s memories of his life with Davis, his fiancé, Chelsea (Alexandra Ficken), his grandmother, Fannie (Andrea Frye), and his childhood friend Drew (Chris Harding). We learn that he loves Pop Tarts, cannot dance, and cuddles with a doll when he is frightened. Nevertheless, a police officer’s fear of Tyler’s blackness supersedes all those individual details. In a particularly effective bit of staging, Tyler and Chelsea faced each other across the stage, talking over each other as they described the events that led up to the shooting. As Chelsea explained that police spotted the couple on the street in the middle of a heated argument, the narration of the night’s events was suddenly cut short by a loud gunshot that reverberated throughout the theatre. The proximity of the sound, its sheer volume, and the experience of hearing it with other audience members made the impact of police violence visceral, rather than simply narrative.

Tyler (Travis Turner) discusses his future with Chelsea (Alexandra Ficken) in Goodnight, Tyler. (Photo: Greg Mooney, courtesy of Alliance Theatre.)

Both the play’s emotional core and the production’s two best performances resided in the two black women who mourn for Tyler: Fannie and Shana (Danielle Deadwyler), a local student who leads protests surrounding his death. Frye effortlessly embodied Fannie’s bottomless grief and her steely resignation to her grandson’s death. Frye trembled with fear and rage as she explained to Chelsea why she hadn’t wanted Tyler to marry her. “You weren’t safe for him!” she erupted. “Somebody took him from me, to protect you!” Fannie’s anguish functions as the play’s fulcrum, embodying both Tyler’s singularity and the systemization of black vulnerability at the hands of police. Unlike Fannie, who raised Tyler, Shana hardly knew him. Shana’s presence, and her insistence that Tyler’s white friends recognize his blackness as the central factor in his murder, reveals grief’s incommensurability in light of the country’s racist history and present. While Tyler’s friends and family are sad for their loss of him, Shana understands Tyler...