Power of Theater: Actor-Playwright April Yvette Thompson Tells the Story of Her Liberty City in New York

By Christine Dolen, The Miami Herald

Mar. 3–In May of 1980, a not-yet-teenaged April Yvette Thompson was a girl with a life very different from those of her classmates at Coconut Grove’s Ransom Everglades School.

For a time, she was the only black student enrolled in the prestigious private school. She was being raised by a father whose outspoken activism got him harassed by police and a mother who morphed from hippie flower child to Jehovah’s Witness as the marriage fell apart. Though her aunt made sure Thompson was dressed in the latest looks from the Jordan Marsh department store on Biscayne Boulevard, the Ransom student came from a family that sometimes had to rely on food stamps to eat.

And then, on May 17, 1980, an all-white jury declared four white police officers not guilty of murdering black insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie, and all hell broke loose in Miami.

This is how the accomplished woman of today evokes what the frightened little girl from Liberty City felt back then: ". . . this mob pulls a white man out of his car; and as they’re dragging him out, the car spins out of control and hits this little girl. The car drags her body across the wall and tears her leg off, right in front of me. . . . I learned the value of a little black girl’s life that day. No one came for her: not the police, not the paramedics — but they could get it on tape for the six o’clock news."

Those words are from Liberty City, a powerful multicharacter solo show by Thompson and Jessica Blank, coauthor of The Exonerated. The play, which blends fact, fiction and memory, tells the story of Thompson’s family and, by extension, Liberty City as it reached a boiling point. With Thompson as the lone performer and Blank as director, the play opens Tuesday at the New York Theatre Workshop, the company where the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent was born.

Thompson met her LibertyCity collaborator when Blank and her actor-husband, Erik Jensen, were developing The Exonerated, their play about Death Row inmates released from prison, some after DNA evidence proved them innocent. Thompson, an award-winning Vassar graduate with a master’s degree from Rutgers University and acting experience at theaters all over the country, originated the role of Georgia Hayes, wife of former Florida inmate Robert Earl Hayes, in the Off-Broadway production of The Exonerated. It was at a party at Thompson’s place in New York in 2003 that the idea for Liberty City was born.

"I noticed that April had been talking for 45 minutes, and everyone was rapt," Blank says by phone from New York. ‘I thought, ‘She’s a great actress, and I bet she’d be a great solo performer.’ She said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve wanted to do a solo show forever!’ "

The women, both passionate believers in the power of theater as an instrument for social change, used what Blank describes as a "documentary/fiction methodology" to come up with their script. Basically, Blank interviewed Thompson about her family, and after reading through the interviews, they focused on certain stories and characters. Blank then interviewed Thompson as the characters. The two further developed the script, and after a string of readings and workshops, a rich play about 50 pages long is what audiences in New York — including members of Thompson’s family, who will be there on opening night — are seeing.

Thompson acknowledges that her play is "part imagined and part historical." Though she plays herself, she also portrays her activist father, her mother, her grandmother, her aunt and others in a family whose heritage is black American, Bahamian and Cuban. She has changed everyone’s name except her own, and she hasn’t shared the script — which includes stories of infidelity, drug addiction and violence, as well as the warmth and humor and political passion of a fascinating family — with her kin.

Her mother’s brother, Christopher Bates, thinks Thompson’s decision to have the family experience Liberty City in performance is a smart one.

‘I told April, ‘Don’t set this up for them. Let it shock them, let it surprise them, let it piss them off,’ " says Bates, acting director of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "The bottom line is, this is where we were. This is who we were."

Thompson’s aunt, Lovette McGill, remembers her niece (born when McGill was just 12) as a little girl who was ‘always actin’. You couldn’t put your wig down, honey. If you did, she’d have it on, put the brush up to her mouth [like a microphone] and be lookin’ into the mirror."

Thompson’s father, Bruce, once thought his bright daughter would go to law school, and he was at first concerned when she wanted to act. But she has continued her social activism, working for the Children’s Defense Fund and doing other child advocacy work. He calls her "a renaissance lady. I’m very proud of her."

New York Theatre Workshop artistic director James Nicola says he chose to premiere Liberty City because of its deft balancing of "the parallel journeys of a family and a community." He observes that the writing in the play is "so good that we couldn’t say no," and says of Thompson as a performer, "Her energy is like a bright, bright light. The sun walks into the room with her."

Both Blank and Thompson say that debuting the play in New York will, if the reviews are good, help give it a future life, and that Miami could be part of that future. Thompson hopes so, anyway.

"It would be amazing for people in Miami to have a look back," she says. "We don’t talk about that time."

Provoking talk, reflection and action is a big part of what drives her as both an artist and the daughter of parents she calls "dreamers who could imagine the world could be just and fair.

"I’ve been very careful choosing the kind of theater work I do," she says. "I didn’t become an actor to be a movie star. Theater can be extremely powerful."

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald’s theater critic.

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