General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Tyla Abercrumbie

Tyla Abercrumbie is an American actress, playwright, and director based in Chicago, best known for playing Nina Williams on the Showtime drama The Chi from 2018 to 2024 and for the play Relentless, her world-premiere drama about Black Victorians set in 1919. Since 2024 she has been a series regular on the CBS crime series NCIS: Origins as Officer Mary Jo Hayes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Signature TV role	Nina Williams on Showtime's The Chi, 2018 to 2024, across six seasons; one credit list counts 49 episodes¹^•³
Current series role	Officer Mary Jo Hayes in NCIS: Origins, the CBS prequel to NCIS, since 2024²
Signature play	Relentless, set in 1919 Philadelphia; world premiere at TimeLine Theatre January 21 to February 26, 2022, then at Goodman Theatre April 1 to May 8, 2022, directed by Ron OJ Parson⁴^•⁵
Education	BA from Columbia College Chicago with a focus in Theatre and Creative Writing; Class of 1998⁶^•⁷
Early life	Grew up in the Austin community on Chicago's west side; her first big role came after years in Chicago's local theater circuit⁶^•⁸
Recognition	Relentless won the Jeff Award for Best New Play; she was a TimeLine Theatre Writers Collective Fellow in 2016⁹^•¹⁰
Affiliations	Company member of TimeLine Theatre; member of Actors' Equity Association⁶

Television career

The Chi gave Abercrumbie her first significant recurring role. She had worked in Chicago's local theater circuit before moving into national theater and television work, with her first big role coming as Nina Johnson, later credited as Nina Williams, on the Showtime series created by Columbia College alumna Lena Waithe.⁸^•⁷ Nina is the mother of the characters Keisha and Kevin, and in an interview with TheaterMania, Abercrumbie described the character's arc across four seasons: helping her children navigate trauma, marriages to two different women on the show, and, after her child's disappearance in season three, a story in which Nina lives for herself as well as her children.¹¹ She stayed with the show through its sixth season in 2024.¹

Other television work spans more than two decades. Recurring roles include Deputy Mayor Regina Cook on AMC's Low Winter Sun (2013), the Transplant Coordinator on The Mob Doctor (2012 to 2013), and a recurring role on The Chicago Code (2011).¹^•³ Guest appearances include Empire, Shameless, Justified, The Big Leap, Somebody Somewhere, Utopia, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med, Proven Innocent, Shrink, Easy, Crisis, and Detroit 1-8-7.¹^•³

NCIS: Origins. In 2024 Abercrumbie joined the series-regular cast of NCIS: Origins, CBS's prequel to the NCIS franchise, playing Officer Mary Jo Hayes, a field operation support officer at the NIS office at Camp Pendleton where a young Leroy Jethro Gibbs begins his career.² Her film credits, mostly in Chicago productions, include The Poker House (2008), Unexpected (2015), Animator (2018), Dreaming Grand Avenue (2020), and We Grown Now (2023).³

Theater career

Abercrumbie has worked as an actor at many of Chicago's leading stages, including the Goodman Theatre, Court Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Northlight Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, and Next Theatre, and regionally at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, Florida's Asolo Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Milwaukee Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Portland Stage Company, and the St. Louis Black Repertory Company.¹^•⁶^•¹⁰ Her stage work includes August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, The Piano Lesson, Radio Golf, and Jitney, as well as Sweat, Pipeline, Detroit '67, and Dominique Morisseau's Paradise Blue, in which she played Silver in the 2021 Geffen Playhouse production in Los Angeles.¹⁰^•¹¹ At TimeLine Theatre she appeared in In Darfur and Paradise Blue and served as Ron OJ Parson's assistant director on A Raisin in the Sun.⁶

Relentless

Relentless is Abercrumbie's best-known play. She began writing it in 2016 during her TimeLine Theatre Playwrights Collective residency and completed it in 2018, and it received its first public reading at TimeLine's inaugural First Draft festival in December 2018.¹²^•⁴ The play was scheduled to premiere in May 2020 at TimeLine but was postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic; it finally opened in January 2022 at Theater Wit under TimeLine's banner, then transferred to the Goodman Theatre's Owen Theatre for an extended run from April 1 to May 8, 2022.¹³^•⁴^•⁵

Setting and subject. The play is set in 1919 in west Philadelphia, where two sisters, Annelle, a socialite, and Janet, a single professional nurse, return home after their mother's death to settle her estate and discover diaries that reveal buried family truths.⁵ Abercrumbie has said her inspiration was a love of the Harlem Renaissance and the writers Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, which led her back to the Victorian era and to the largely unexamined figure of the affluent, educated Black Victorian.¹² She chose 1919 for its parallels with 2020, a year of pandemic, racial unrest, and rapid social change.¹² She has also said the play is part of a planned trilogy, with a second play exploring the descendants of the characters in 2022 and a third still a mystery.¹² The production won the Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) Award for Best New Play.⁹

Playwriting and other writing

Beyond Relentless, Abercrumbie's plays include Who's Afraid of Deepak Chopra, Asylum (aka Life), Psychological Terrorism, Naked and Raw, The Straw, Affair of Ambiguity, Normality, Whiskey Sour, and Only Women Bleed.¹^•⁶ Her work has been produced by Pittsburgh Playwrights' Theatre, MPAACT Theatre, and the Chicago Cultural Center, and The Straw received a professional staged reading with Chicago Dramatists.⁶ She was named a TimeLine Theatre Writers Collective Fellow in 2016 and received the Raven Theatre Playwrights Initiative Award; BroadwayWorld reports she received a $25,000 Raven Theatre grant in 2021 to produce a new work.¹⁰^•⁸

She has also written outside the theater. Her book Red Wine and the Bles'sed Monkey, a collection of prose and poetry, established her as a poet who performed around the country and opened for keynote speakers including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and she has developed a stand-up show, Naked & Raw 3 (The Takers and the Tooken).⁶

Background

Abercrumbie grew up in the Austin community on Chicago's west side and has kept the city as her home base. She enrolled at Columbia College Chicago after dropping out of Roosevelt University, earning a BA with a focus in Theatre and Creative Writing, and launched her stage career at Chicago's ETA Creative Arts Foundation.⁶^•⁷ In a 2011 Chicago Magazine profile she recalled taking her first drama class only at Columbia: "If I'm going to pay for school, I'm going to do what I want."¹⁴ She remains a TimeLine Theatre company member and a member of Actors' Equity Association.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Screen people and creators › Screen actors of the Anglosphere and Europe › American actors: 2000s onward › Surnames A to At

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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