When Life is Incomprehensible
REVIEW by ANTHONY CHASE
There are events in life that confuse us, but none more so than the senseless death of a young person. As B.J. Tindal's play Goodnight, Tyler begins, a confused young Black man named Tyler is urgently trying to awaken his White roommate named Davis with the unexpected and unlikely news: "I think I died tonight."
This disarming opening establishes the play's complicated emotional terrain -- a very unlikely sentimental comedy with a very serious core. The play is currently running at Ujima’s Lorna C. Hill Theater on Plymouth Avenue, in an affecting production, directed by Curtis Lovell.
Humor is the balm that playwright Tindal employs to ease us into the treacherous emotional landscape of Goodnight, Tyler. The young man is correct in his assessment of affairs. He is dead. In fact, he has been shot to death by a police officer.
When his roommate understandably asks, "Why would the police shoot you?" Tyler quips, "Because they were aiming at the nice yoga instructor walking out of Whole Foods across the street and they missed. Why the hell do you think, Davis?"
It's a very dark kind of humor, used strategically to make the unbearable somehow bearable, the unthinkable, somehow possible to talk about.
The production has been staged in-the-round, positioning audience members as intimate witnesses with varied perspectives. This is a story centered on police violence against Black Americans, but told through the lens of personal grief rather than political polemic. There is, of course, always an element of the political embedded in the personal. The set, by Alan Thomas, features a floor expressionistically punctuated with the names of people killed by police violence.
The ghost of Tyler -- a 26-year-old Black man with his entire life ahead of him, including a new fiancée -- hovers between worlds, desperately trying to orchestrate how he'll be remembered. Cordell Hopkins imbues the character with a winning combination of boyish charm and unexpected gravitas, making his premature death at the hands of police all the more personal and therefore all the more devastating than might be possible from viewing a sequence of media images.
The emotional wringer begins to turn as we observe the circle of loved ones grappling with this senseless loss. First up is Davis, the only person to whom Tyler’s ghost appears. His friendship with Tyler -- complicated, devoted, and occasionally fractious -- forms the beating heart of this play, with Daniel Bills-Warman delivering a convincing portrayal of the sometimes self-centered but ultimately loving White gay roommate, nurturing, dramatic, and prone to sarcasm, who cannot fathom life without his best friend. The Act Two interactions between Hopkins and Bills-Warman are particularly effective, as Tindal taunts us with the unhappy reality that funerals are not really for the deceased; they are for the grieving, but by foisting this process into the arena of public scrutiny, the circumstances of Tyler’s death have deprived Davis of that privilege. Tyler has died, not as a person, but as a communal monument. Desperate for the haunting to stop, and having had his private grief sidelined in the face of Tyler’s most public and horrific death, Davis is obliged to inform the ghost, “This is not about you.” It’s a startling moment.
Navigating both overwhelming grief and the complex racial dynamics of her relationship is Chelsea Notley, Tyler's White fiancée. Julia Pitarresi plays her with layered dimension and restraint, subtly conveying a woman who understands that loving Tyler meant accepting his entire chosen family, but who never comprehends the full implications of this, and whose immediate emotions frequently get the best of her.
Zachary Bellus plays Drew Miller, the hyper-bro friend wrestling with how to preserve Tyler's memory while processing his own complicated grief, jealousies, and self-identity. In addition to the device of the ghost, Tindal deploys playful dream sequences. Pitarresi and Bellus particularly excel in these, as their characters grapple with their unsettled situations and unrealized identities.
Tanika Holmes delivers a masterful performance as the domineering Ms. Evans, Tyler's imperious grandmother whose world revolves around what she believes will benefit her beloved grandson. She lavishes him with tough love and generous heaps of disapproval, rejecting Chelsea as a fiancée for reasons far more complex than merely her color. (Surprisingly, she approves of Davis, who fits into her scheme). The grandmother-grandson dynamic powerfully reflects possible generational differences in how Black Americans navigate a hostile world. Ms. Evans has seen a lot, and she’s learned from what she’s seen. She despises innocent naiveté, because it is dangerous.
The odd person out in this play is Shana Harris, a community activist and the voice of righteous anger at yet another Black life cut short by police violence. For many in the audience, this might be the most familiar voice in the play. Janaé Leonard brings a fierce urgency to the character, an impassioned young woman who is sincerely trying to reconcile the personal and the political in the face of unreasonable horror. The playwright hands this character palpable laughs at unlikely moments, as when she espouses a particularly ugly or inconvenient truth. Leonard lands these skillfully, while never losing hold of Shana’s role as a persistently logical and questioning presence.
The strength of the production lies in these vivid and sensitive performances, which director Lovell has guided through their clashing contours of comedy and angst. It bears mention that at times these portrayals are sensitive to a fault, resulting in some emotionally indulgent pacing issues.
Tindal's script finds its power in refusing easy answers in favor of unanswerable questions. Tyler was more than a statistic, a symbol, or a sequence of images on the television news -- he was a person embedded in a complex web of relationships that the playwright showcases most potently in two scenes in which the characters square off in competition: the first, a painful yet comical attempt to distribute Tyler’s personal effects; the second, an absurdly contentious drinking game that culminates in a revelation that changes everything.
Director Lovell’s decision to stage the play in-the-round renders mixed results. Conceptually, the idea is excellent; it creates an atmosphere where grief becomes communal. We witness characters circle around the truth of what happened and what it means, each claiming different parts of Tyler's identity and legacy. At the same time, in execution, the design is too linear for the effect to work consistently. For Act One, one side of the audience is head-on and inarguably at the back of the action, face-to-face with the planar expanse of a large and boxy sofa; for Act Two, the other side of the audience endures the same obstacle. Effective costumes are by Jennifer Simpson, with evocative light by Kyra-Jade Lewis.
At its heart, Goodnight, Tyler poses difficult questions about memory and identity. Who gets to define a person after they're gone? How do we reconcile different versions of someone we loved? How do we move forward when the connections that bound us together are severed? And how is this complicated in the face of wanton racial injustice?
Goodnight, Tyler delivers a rare and affecting blend of dark humor and deep emotion, finding unexpected grace in the spaces between grief, memory, and justice. The production doesn't offer neat resolutions. Instead, it presents grief as messy, competitive, and ultimately transformative. As Tyler's loved ones struggle to define his memory, they must also redefine themselves in his absence. In a theatrical landscape increasingly engaged with racial injustice, Goodnight, Tyler distinguishes itself by keeping its focus on the human cost.
"Goodnight, Tyler" runs through March 16, 2025 at the Lorna C. Hill Theater, 429 Plymouth Avenue, Buffalo.
