[1] The play's world premiere, directed by Gilbert Moses, took place on January 5, 1986 at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, New York for a four-week run.
[2] In March 1986, Mario Cuomo and Kitty Carlisle Hart presented Morrison with the New York State Governor's Arts Award for Dreaming Emmett and other works.
[3] The play was commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute and the Capital District Humanities Program at SUNY-Albany, to commemorate the first celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The Institute and its related programming were supported by Governor Mario Cuomo and the state legislature as a way to establish Albany as a destination for the development of quality writers.
[5] The play is often described as Morrison's first attempt at playwriting, though she had written the book and lyrics for New Orleans, a musical that received a six-week workshop production in 1982 and staged readings at New York Shakespeare Festival in 1984.
"[1] Morrison, who also acknowledged the tension between writer and director as different from the solo pursuit of a novelist, wrote the play in the midst of developing her 1987 novel Beloved (which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1988).
Lorraine Toussaint, eventually cast in the role of Tamara, was ill with flu and Moses interrupted her reading to have her skip to another section.
[11] In fall 1985, sculptor Willa Shalit was contracted by Morrison and Gilbert Moses to develop a series of masks for the show.
Shalit had previously met artistic director Bruce Bouchard while working on a project at Radio City Music Hall, and contributed a death mask for Capital Repertory Theatre's production of The Wake of Jamie Foster.
The design process began as an exchange of sketches and ideas with Gilbert Moses, emphasizing abstract imagery and dreamscapes, later refined to be more concrete and suggestive of dream, rather than attempting to depict all the aspects of the fantasy.
Elements such as a complex scene involving a chair that consumes Emmett in a surrealistic way were revised to be less complicated.
"The reception was nearly over at 7:30 when a beaming Morrison arrived and strode through the room to bravos and applause," said the Albany Times Union.
Goepfert praised Morrison's writing skills, despite her inexperience with drama, as compelling, expressing ideas that linger in profound ways.
[2] Variety echoed this critique, calling it "verbose, redundant and confusing," though it praised Joseph C. Phillips' performance and the production values of the theatre.
[23] Albany journalist Martin P. Kelly praised the importance of the work but criticized "...theatricality that gets between the audience and the theme."
Kelly noted good performances and remarked that the play "raises an issue but does not provide intriguing drama.
[25] "A two-act, one-set eight-character intensely theatrical experience, the play has a convoluted plot line that moves across time past and present and unravels like an onion," said The Berkshire Eagle.
"Every layer seems necessary to the shape and sense of the play and our reaction to it, but at the end, when all has unraveled, we have nothing solid left to remember or set our minds to rest upon.
"[26] Metroland found the acting ensemble to be among the best the theatre had produced, finding fault mainly with the extraneous production elements that distracted from the play's core drama.
[28] Scholar Hortense Spillers, speaking at a post-performance lecture at the theatre in Albany, praised the play, which she noted was not representational of the story of Emmett Till, but an exploration of deeper issues through the use of poetic literary devices and theatrical expressionism.
She pointed to the masks as "overwhelming" the play with their shocking reveal and distortion of space, manifesting Till's internal perspectives.
She posits that the dreaming structure allowed Morrison flexibility to engage with the subject matter, avoiding the "commemoration machine" that might otherwise overshadow her themes.