The plot of playwright korde arrington tuttle’s graveyard shift commemorates the 2015 death of Sandra Bland. Much like Bland, Janelle (Aneisa Hicks) is a black civil rights activist from Chicago who moves to Texas for a job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, and to be together with her boyfriend, Kane (a stunning Debo Balogun). Like Bland, she is stopped by a small-town policeman for a minor offense—failing to signal a lane change—and ends up in jail after their confrontation escalates. Like Bland, Janelle dies in her cell, hanging from a makeshift noose.
But graveyard shift goes beyond the facts of Bland’s life and death. This lyrical, searching, brutally tragic play is like a Greek myth that replaces divine fate with the crushing realities of American racism: how its past informs its present, and how its present denies people like Janelle and Kane the futures they deserve. As it barrels inexorably toward Janelle’s death, tuttle expends most of his poetic energies on how very alive she is.
The play sets Janelle’s trajectory in parallel to that of her arresting officer, Brian (Keith D. Gallagher), a likeable-enough chump with no passion for police work but possessed of a wounded ego that pairs poorly with his badge. Between having an affair with a coworker (Rae Gray) and pissing off his boss (Lia D. Mortensen), Brian doesn’t have much going for him, and he knows it. But his uniform, complete with mirrored aviator sunglasses, gives him an authoritarian swagger. There’s Brian the man and Brian the cop; the difference between the two, for Janelle, is the difference between life and death. The scenes set in the Prairie View police station don’t buzz with life like the ones between Janelle and Kane; they have a sad sense of normalcy. Even her death barely registers for these people—until Kane arrives and forces them to hear it.
Danya Taymor’s direction, which combines cool classical strokes with contemporary liveliness and a brutalist emotionality, recalls the 2017 Steppenwolf production of Pass Over that put her on Chicago’s map. The desolate set, by Kristen Robinson, is a particle-board runway that ends in a pair of large wooden doors that are set in a massive wall. Marcus Doshi’s lighting shapes the play’s moods, from lamplit romance to fluorescent-drenched late-shift drudgery.
The exact circumstances of Bland’s death are a mystery that graveyard shift preserves, opting instead for a moment of mystical grace. When it returns to earth in the final scene, the play stumbles a bit, as though struggling to find words beyond pat reassurance. When faced with the world that graveyard shift captures—so cruel, so wonderful, so irreconcilably both—what is left to say?
Goodman Theatre. By korde arrington tuttle. Directed by Danya Taymor. With Aneisa Hicks, Keith D. Gallagher, Debo Balogun, Rae Gray, Lia D. Mortensen. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.