Photo courtesy of Delta State | Special to Northea In this circa 1950 photograph, Emmett Till (left) sits on a bicycle beside his cousin, Wheeler Parker (right) with his passenger, Joe Williams. Till's slaying is the topic of the play, "Till," as well as a public discussion, "Till, from Script to Stage," set for Tuesday.

The program is free with $5 museum admission.

"Till" is a play about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy who was brutally killed in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman in a grocery store while visiting the tiny Delta hamlet of Money.

Till's brutal death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement.

The play is by Ifa Bayeza, who received a fellowship from Brown University's Rites and Reason Theatre in 2005 to do a workshop on "Till."

Full production is slated to inaugurate the new Providence Black Repertory Theatre in 2007.

Colley-Lee

The museum discussion will be among moderator Bayeza, director Karen Allen Baxter and Myra Colley-Lee, production designer.

The museum's program is one of several educational activities and special events for adults and students planned in conjunction with GladRags: Sketches, Swatches and Costume Designs by Myrna Colley-Lee, which opened June 10 and will run through Oct. 15.

In this exhibition, the art of costume design is explored through the work of designer Myrna Colley-Lee of Charleston, a Mississippian who is known for her work in the regional theater circuit.

"We were meeting with Myrna about the exhibition that we recently mounted, and she told us about the project that she's working on ("Till") and we were very interested for several reasons," said Betsy Bradley, director of the Mississippi Museum of Art.

"One is that it is about a very important piece of Mississippi history," Bradley said. "And it addresses it in an artistic way. The significance for an art museum is that a visual artist, a designer, is part of the process of creating a dramatic piece from the very beginning. So it's a multi-disciplinary collaboration about a subject of immense interest to people in the state."

"We think it's a real opportunity to learn about an artistic technique (process theatre) that's relatively innovative," Bradley said.

The play was recently written, said Colley-Lee.

"Ifa has just finished writing the play in its entirety," Colley-Lee said. "I've seen two read-throughs of it, the first being movements one and two and the other being movements one, two, three and four. I just saw that about two months ago."

"Now we're starting to think about scenery and costumes," she said, adding that the clothing will be period, but the scenery will be very abstract because the play does not take place in linear time; it goes back and forth.

"It takes place in Chicago, where he lived with his mother, in Mississippi, where he lived with his uncle and cousins, in a shack where he was murdered and in the courtroom where the trial took place."

"The audience at the museum discussion should get a feel about how a playwright uses historical information to construct an emotional reaction to the incident," Colley-Lee said.

"We'll be talking about what she's trying to get across, what she feels about the events, who Till was, the spirit of the times and the whole atmosphere surrounding the incident," Colley-Lee said.