Face Off Theatre in Kalamazoo recently opened its 2024 season with “Goodnight, Tyler.” WMUK’s Gordon Bolar has this review.
Sometimes in the theater, flaws that appear near the beginning of a play’s performance don’t prevent the production from delivering an ending that moves the audience. And sometimes the voice of a young playwright needs to find an audience, despite the raw and developing talent behind the work. Such is the case with Face Off Theatre’s “Goodnight, Tyler” by B.J. Tindal, a black, queer writer, and winner of the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition.
Tindal’s script tells the tale of Tyler Evans, a young black man shot by the police one night in an urban landscape. Although such shootings are a horrible and ubiquitous reality in America, Tindal’s angle in exploring Tyler’s story is grounded in magical realism and domestic comedy, as well as an awareness of present-day political issues.
Before the lights ever come up, we hear a shot fired, followed by a siren. Then Tyler, played by Jared Pittman, frantically enters his darkened apartment to wake his sleeping roommate Davis. He soon relays the breaking news: Tyler himself has just been shot dead by the police. “I am very dead!” he tells Davis.
As Tyler relates this other-worldly recollection of his recent demise, a groggy Davis, played by Jonathan Townley, tries to reconcile the fact that he’s talking to a ghost that only talks to him.
This encounter, and a few others in the first act, could have had more serious impact and humor if the performers, especially Pittman, had slowed their dialogue. Instead, key words and phrases, although audible, are marred or rendered unintelligible by rapid-fire delivery. The result is that neither the audience nor the actors have time to register the gravity - or momentary absurdity - of what the characters are saying.
Another obstacle to full appreciation of ‘Goodnight, Tyler” - is actors playing with their backs to large sections of the audience for extended periods of time. Occasional turns or crossings of the thrust stage would have allowed all of the actors’ faces to be by seen everyone in the house.
Thankfully, director Marissa Harrington’s production rises above these initial problems and delivers a satisfying and captivating Second Act.
This act begins with a series of dream sequences. Jared Pittman shows appropriate consternation as Tyler’s ghost wakes up in his former apartment. He encounters his now pregnant, white, fiancé Chelsea, played with energy and enthusiasm by Shannon Hill, and soon finds out he’s temporarily living in her dream not his own.
Other successful scenes in Act Two include the ritual male bonding fist-and-full body bump greetings between Pittman and his white pal Drew, played with robust flair by August Gallagher.
Jonathan Townley’s Davis captures the audience’s sympathies with his gut-wrenching confession of sexual attraction to Tyler, the object of desire he knows he’ll never have.
Some of Jared Pittman’s best work includes his listening and reflective, sensitive response to Davis’s professed affections. Along with Hill’s Chelsea, Pittman is also effective in the emotional shared narration and demonstration of the surprising incident that took his life.
Brenda Earvin delivers a solid, soaring, and memorable performance as Fannie, Tyler’s grandmother. In a flashback to happier times, she reminds Tyler's friends of moments in his upbringing, and the stable home life she established for her grandson.
As the family matriarch, Earvin leads those gathered in remembering and celebrating Tyler, first through anecdotes, and then through uplifting hymns at the funeral. Earvin is full of savvy and frank directives to other characters as she guides the trajectory of life-story recollections for the Tyler she raised.
When Tyler’s fiancé Chelsea, and Shana, a representative of “Black Lives Matter” played by Aija Hodges, stake their claim on Tyler’s memory, Earvin’s character assists in resolving an essential question posed by the playwright: “Who’s grief matters?”
The weighty subject matter of “Goodnight Tyler” is punctuated by welcome moments of laughter in a production that overcomes early difficulties through a steadier pace by its conclusion.
