Liberty City, a multi-character solo play performed by April Yvette Thompson, directed by Jessica Blank, is inspired by April’s childhood in 1970s Miami and her family’s journey through the end of the Black Power movement. Co-written by April Yvette Thompson and Jessica Blank (The Exonerated), it is the story of April’s Miami: a place where colonized people from throughout the African diaspora have gathered, intermarried, bought homes, raised families, vote and still see themselves as immigrants. a place where the big city and the islands rub up against each other, where some immigrants wrestle their way up into the corridors of power while others continue to struggle, where histories and countries coalesce and intermingle to make a new American story.
Enter April Yvette Thompson, the daughter of a Bahamian and Cuban father and an African American mother, but not just any old Afro-Cuban Caribbean-American mix. Her parents were children of the sixties in every way: young militants, free thinkers, movement people and sometimes just plain poor. April spent her days on scholarship as the only black girl at Miami’s most exclusive prep school and her nights and mornings in liberty city, the site of Miami’s infamous 1980s riots. As the hope of the sixties and seventies gave way to the disintegration and violence of the eighties, April’s family struggled to survive and stay together, and April learned to pick up the pieces where her parents left off.
April ‘s story is the story of the children of children of the sixties who were not quite all American. It’s a story of a sprawling family marked by tragedy and bound by fierce love, a history cross-pollinated by six different cultures, a patchwork of old feuds and surprising alliances. It is the story of her Miami: a place shaped by immigrants and islands, by intermarriage and rebellion, by history and struggle and love.
Liberty City is now playing in Miami at The Arsht Center (Downtown Miami)
Feb 18 – March 1, 2009
Click here for tickets and for a video clip of the play