BEFORE HE STEPS onstage as Ike Turner in TINA: The Tina Turner Musical, Garrett Turner (no relation) does a simple ritual: He swirls a wooden mallet along the rim of a Tibetan singing bowl. As the sound washes over him, he focuses on himself as Garrett, not Ike the musician and abusive ex-husband of the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll.” And he prays.
“Tina found Buddhism on her way to liberation from Ike, and it was something that Ike decried,” Garrett told me a few days after I saw him perform in Atlanta. Embracing something that Ike pushed away helps Garrett become Ike onstage while remaining Garrett within. With eight shows a week for the touring Broadway production, this spiritual practice helps Garrett draw a clear line between himself and the broken man he portrays.
Garrett describes himself on his website as “a Jesus-loving free Black man.” For him, “joy is an asset. A weapon. A treasure.” Ike’s life, on the other hand, was overshadowed by cocaine addiction, abuse, racialized violence, and capitalist ambition. As challenging as it is to play Ike, a man whose weapon was often his own body, Garrett finds joy in it. He credits some of that joy to the “well-placed, delicious lines” written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Katori Hall. Turner also has fun embodying Ike’s delight as a musician. “I refer to the arc of his life as a spiritual tragedy,” Garrett explained. Toward the end of his life, Ike repented for his drug addiction, but he “never got there with the abuse [of Tina] or with his patriarchal beliefs and relations to women. He was trapped in this hellscape his entire life.”
I met Garrett through his sister, my friend Lora Turner Smothers, founder of Joy Village School, a K-8 school that centers the joy and thriving of Black youth in Athens, Georgia. After a Saturday matinee of TINA, the Turner family and friends filled a table of 12. The server at the brewpub waited quietly while Lora’s husband gave the blessing.
Garrett said studying Ike might have been the hardest part of this role, noting that Ike’s autobiography “essentially reads as the chronicles of a sexual predator and serial abuser, where he revels in his escapades.” Instead of admitting his wrongdoing, Ike tried to explain away his abusive behavior. “To imbibe that into my spirit was really difficult,” Garrett said.
In the musical, we see Ike, driven by greed and ambition, push his family to the breaking point with nonstop performances. “Capitalism pushes us to regard ourselves as money-making machines, as if we don’t have a soul,” Garrett said.
Garrett is intentional about life not imitating art as he and his wife, Bonita Jackson Turner, also an actor, prepare to welcome their first child in June. In the musical, Tina Turner performs the day after giving birth. For this Turner family, another actor will step in as Ike, allowing Garrett and Bonita to focus on becoming new parents.
At curtain call, Garrett runs onto the stage beaming, wearing Ike’s costume but fully himself. Some audience members boo at the man who treated Tina so terribly. Garrett presses his hands to his heart, smiles his infectious smile, and takes a bow.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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