Tarell Alvin McCraney’s New Play Confronts State Violence and the Price of “Blood Money”
We are sitting in a dark room. Three performers stand on stage, speaking to us about love, warmth, song, and light. One by one, every person in the audience pulls out a phone and illuminates the darkened Guggenheim Theater. Suddenly, we are surrounded by the light we brought ourselves, lighting one another—until the lead stops singing. Until everything stops.
Windfall, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, directed by Awoye Timpo, presented by Works & Process, and performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, is set in a near-future American city that feels eerily like our own. A parent is offered a government settlement after state violence takes their child’s life. The money could save the home he already owns but now risks losing due to tax liens and redevelopment plans. The settlement could secure his future—if he can live with what accepting blood money means.
During the talkback, McCraney shared the question that had been sitting with him for years, sharpened after the killing of Trayvon Martin: what do cities actually do when a public servant’s violence ends in the death of a citizen? Not theoretically—practically. It turns out major American cities budget for this exact eventuality. There is a line item set aside to settle with families whose loved ones have been killed or maimed by civil servants. There is no equivalent line item to prevent it. The money exists because it is expected. Because it is predictable. Because it is built into the civic machinery that runs this country—the same system that replaces broken streetlights and clears parks of litter.
McCraney said he tried to approach it logically. Do a Spock. In a late-capitalist society, of course the system attempts to resolve a moral catastrophe with a check. Grief becomes paperwork.
Windfall does what the best American theater does: it takes a structural horror and makes it intimate. As I write this, my daughter is sleeping in her bassinet beside me. I thought of her during a scene in which the father texts his child, apologizing for using the wrong pronouns. For not being understanding. He is trying—late, but trying—to end an argument. He thinks they are angry. He thinks they need space. He believes he is giving them space, hoping for a second chance.
He does not know they are dead.
I sobbed. I could see my own child in her crib—peaceful, safe. The way she envelops my entire life whenever we hold her in our arms. I imagined an argument born more from my ego than her need. Reacting poorly. Realizing I was wrong and trying desperately to fix it. Believing I was giving space, only to find out they were simply… gone.
The father stands with the letter in his hand. It is not delivered in person—just dropped in the mail. They shot his child. The city offers compensation. As he stares at the letter, stunned, as it rips him open while others urge him to take the money, he breaks walking offstage. The letter, he tells us, did not even say, “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry” would never have been enough. They denied him even that.
And yet, through the horror, there is an actual windfall. The father calls it blood money. His nephew calls it salvation.
“That’s blood money.”
“It’s all blood money. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
The nephew explains annuities, generational uplift, how the settlement could stabilize the entire family. Meanwhile, the city is threatening to seize the father’s fully paid-off home for unpaid property taxes in order to build mixed-income housing. He may lose the house he already bought, only to be relocated into an apartment built on the same land. Except he cannot qualify for that apartment because the police labeled his dead child a criminal. With a “criminal case” in the family, he would be disqualified from living there.
They have not even returned the body for burial.
So, does he take the settlement? Do you accept the thing you hate? The money meant to replace your child? Do you choose financial survival over moral revulsion? Do you sacrifice dignity to preserve the future? Is this what it costs to climb?
I have been thinking lately about how much of our world runs on blood money. We like to attach that phrase to old fortunes and empires built on atrocity, but it is not just them. It is what we wear, what we eat, what we stream, what we order. Even small businesses rely on massive corporate infrastructures to survive. You want to support your community, but the system beneath it is compromised. You want to be ethical, but if you stare directly at every horror, you will stop functioning.
So we compartmentalize. We swallow what we can. We keep moving.
But what happens when the horror is not abstract? When it is not four generations back or hidden inside a supply chain? When it is standing in your kitchen, in your mailbox, in your child’s empty room?
Windfall holds that tension without simplifying it. It asks what you do when the world hands you a ladder built from destruction. You still need to climb. It is not your fault that you must climb. But now the climb is greased by atrocity. A life taken in an instant. Money in exchange.
From the preview scenes alone, Windfall feels poised to become one of the most urgent new American plays of 2026. Running April 9 through May 31, 2026 with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the production features Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, Esco Jouley, Wendell Pierce, and Namir Smallwood—an ensemble whose gravity and restraint anchor the play’s moral storm.
One of the actors said during the talkback, “I’m at a point in my life where I don’t want to perform anymore. I want to share. I want people to join me in that.”
That is the energy Windfall carries at its best. Not performance. Not preachiness. A communal reckoning. An invitation to look directly at the machinery we live inside—state violence, government settlements, systemic injustice—name it, feel it, and ask one another: what now?