Theatre Y and Michael Montenegro: Little Carl

Singing to a Bullet

An Essay by Paulette Richards

“You have to be brave enough and strong enough to face the emotion.”
Kyndal Keith, age 6

Kyndal Keith, along with her mother, Jasmine Keith, and her grandmother, Reshorna Fitzpatrick is part of the vocal trio that accompanies the action of Little Carl, as the events of yet another life cut short by a police shooting unfold onstage. In Object Performance in the Black Atlantic: The United States, I argue that the sacrifice of a Black body (usually male) is one of the most powerful scripts in American culture. By “scripts” I mean rituals devoid of a narrative arc in which the participants have agency to affect the outcome (Richards, 2023: 13). Once the script has been set in motion, the people involved abdicate their agency to change the outcome, just as Nigerian-American J. Alexander Keung participated in pinning George Floyd to the ground while his supervisor, Derek Chauvin, asphyxiated him. Though the play presents Little Carl as an individual who has a girlfriend, typical adolescent conflicts with his parents, and a love of basketball, the show sets him up as an archetypal figure who stands for generations of victims. Enacting his death onstage consequently assumes a ritual function. I therefore asked Michael Montenegro, the show’s director, “What is the purpose of that ritual?”

“The original idea of this play for me was that the women would sing to the bullet, and we would change the ending depending upon the commitment of the singers,” Montenegro replied. He even explored the idea of quantum physics in early drafts. “I don’t pretend to understand it in any way, but from my limited understanding of it, the universe is made up of possibilities. A person’s prayer or deep wish or hope on some level perhaps does have an effect on the outcome of fate.” Thus, he envisioned inviting the audience to contribute to the singing and that it would have an effect, metaphorically, on the outcome. He wanted to emphasize that we all do have agency in the world, in our life, and in our society. “By singing in a choir or by some positive act or creating a piece of poetry or music, you are altering your circumstances and everyone around you, no matter how dark. It’s an antidote to despair. One of the few antidotes,” he said.

Fitzpatrick, who is also the First Lady of the historic Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church located in the North Lawndale community, definitely sees the need for such antidotes and has expressed the wish that the show could be performed for her congregation on a regular basis because, for many of them, gun violence is an everyday thing. According to the City of Chicago Violence Reduction Dashboard statistics, there were 88 shooting victimizations in North Lawndale in 2023, including sixteen fatal shootings and twelve multi-victim shooting incidents.¹ North Lawndale residents nevertheless have a long history of resilience. Annexed to the city in 1869, the relocation of a McCormick harvesting reaper factory into the community enabled many Chicagoans a fresh start after the Great Fire of 1871. Waves of Czech immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire arrived in the 1890s, followed by Eastern European Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century. When African-Americans began migrating to the area from the Deep South in the 1950s, however, they found that Jim Crow was alive and well in the North. Residential segregation made it difficult for them to find decent housing. John W. Fountain, the award-winning journalist who as a youth in the 1970s observed the impact of pervasive disinvestment on the K-Town section of the community, wrote, “I used to joke that the ‘K’ stood for ‘kill.’ I was only half-joking” (2005: 4). 

Little Carl opens with a large cloth puppet representing Carl’s lifeless body heaped on the floor downstage. Marvin Tate as Pops comes out and mourns over his son. The unspeakable loss of a child to gun violence is a public health issue that disproportionately affects minority communities like North Lawndale. According to the CDC, in 2021 Black males had the highest age-adjusted rate of firearm-related homicide (52.9 deaths per 100,000 standard population) (Garnett & Spencer, 2023: 737). Brady: United Against Gun Violence, founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns, defines gun violence as a racial justice issue, pointing out that “Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to die from gun violence and 14 times more likely than white Americans to be wounded” (2023: 2). Brady also notes that Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by police and constitute 31% of all police-involved fatalities” (2023: 5) Montenegro acknowledges that his show does not present any political solutions but asserts that “to do art itself is in a way singing to a bullet. To create a piece of poetic art about this difficult issue is not passive at all. It is an active attempt to alter something.”

Though the initial vision for the show came to Montenegro in a dream, he lost a lot of sleep in the process of adapting his original script for the Theatre Y performers. “What right do I have to expose these kids to this issue, when it’s a daily occurrence to them?” he asked himself. Yet, from the first workshops he co-taught with Marvin Tate, the young people indicated that gun violence was the issue most on their minds. His collaboration with co-director Melissa Lorraine and the young performers led to choices that illustrate how effectively puppets function as metaphors. Three-dimensional tabletop rod puppets made of upcycled materials act out Carl’s frolic on the playground. Then the narrative moves into the realm of shadows, with the police officer appearing as a silhouette. His gun becomes a distinct performing object with its own agency as it claims Carl’s life. Montenegro explains:

Essentially the thrust was to take something very difficult to handle and use metaphor and poetry to transcend the pain of it and the grief. That transcendence is never easy or automatic. It has to be earned. It’s very easy to miss the target by wallowing in the tragedy of it. The attempt is to find transcendence in poetry, in metaphor.

Though Montenegro admits that his young collaborators are still at an age where they do not necessarily understand metaphor, he nonetheless resisted their desire for a more graphic depiction of the violence. Pointing to Kabuki theater, he notes that, 

When an actor is impaled by a sword, a red ribbon comes out and slowly drops to the stage. Red against white and black. The symbolism is much more powerful than a bag of blood. The metaphor is so much more powerful, and yet there is a certain distance that allows you to embrace it. That’s the trouble with Hollywood. The graphic stuff, you shut down. The human spirit can’t take those things but the metaphor, you can somehow digest it. 

Montenegro points to children’s propensity for working out issues through play as evidence that the critical distance introduced by the puppets protected the young performers from retraumatization during Little Carl’s development process. Thus, one purpose of staging this ritual has been to empower the young performers with tools for processing their own grief. “It could be two stones or two sticks or a spoon and a fork. They can act out a tragedy that they witness and somehow it’s much easier than the literal,” says Montenegro. Still, he tried to be sensitive to his cast’s experiences and opinions as well. They thought the idea of singing to a bullet was absurd, so he altered the script and added the line “We can’t sing; our hearts are broken.” 

“Grief is a heavy thing to relive,” observed an audience member during the talk-back after the performance I attended. Montenegro indicates that audience members are regularly moved to tears, recalling their own experiences with gun violence. At the first dress rehearsal, one of the four audience members commented, “I lost my son a year ago to gun violence. This performance was cathartic for me.” Catharsis is, in fact, Montenegro’s motivation for staging this ritual. First Lady Fitzpatrick told him that for a lot of her congregants, the way they deal with death is to find ways to not deal with it. She appreciates the show’s message that “here is something difficult to deal with, but as a group or community we embrace it.” Small wonder six-year-old Kyndal Keith’s favorite part of the show is “when we all get together onstage and hold hands.”