THE SOIRÉE WAS AT the Steuben Club in Albany a half- hour before the premiere. The gray-haired star of the evening had not been expected to make an appearance. The journalists, politicos, benefactors, and academics in attendance presumed the playwright (who did not consider herself a playwright) would forgo the festivities on account of opening-night jitters. But there she was, wearing a bow-tie scarf and spiked heels, accompanied by her two sons.

“You’re supposed to be nervous,” someone shouted.

“I am,” Toni Morrison replied.

For Morrison, this was a new world—sort of. She was known for her novels, including Song of Solomon, and was hard at work on another that, for the moment, had been set aside. Now, at the outset of 1986, the novelist was about to debut her first full-length play. This production was closer to her heart, as it originated from an incident she'd been thinking about for three decades: the murder of Emmett Till, a Black Chicago teenager who was killed by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam while visiting family in Mississippi. Morrison was excited about the script and made revisions to it throughout the months of rehearsals. “I thought it was an extraordinary theatrical idea,” she told a journalist that night. “A way to handle history. A way to talk about all sorts of collisions, of fixed ideas and attitudes—collisions of gender, collisions of history, collisions of race, collisions of time, collisions of reality.”

She planned to take Dreaming Emmett to Paris after the initial run.