2015: Freedomland

Written by Michael Gene Sullivan
Music & Lyrics by Ira Marlowe
Directed by Andrea Snow with the SF Mime Troupe

Freedomland features Mime Troupe Collective Members Hugo E Carbajal, Lisa Hori-Garcia, and Michael Gene Sullivan plus new trouper George P. Scott

And band members Ray Fernandez, Aaron Kierbel and Daniel Savio


View original playbill

View the full company's bios

View show photos
View press photos

View YouTube Trailer

Song Clip: Keep Alive 0:52
    Michael Gene Sullivan
Song Clip: Until There's Order 2:04
    Lisa Hori-Garcia, George P. Scott

Learn more about the subject matter for this year's show!

Listen to a post show discution following the performance on from July 18, 2015. Featuring: Professor Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Michael Gipson, D'Andre Teeter and Michael Gene Sullivan. Audio courtesy of KALW.
Poster
Photographer: DavidAllenStudio.com
Poster Design: Lawton Lovely


A door is blown off its hinges! Into a blasted room of scarred walls and shattered windows, armed with M-16's, America's bravest duck and dodge for cover, finally training their deadly gunsights on... an old black man watching TV on his couch? This isn't Baghdad or Kandahar - its home, and for ex-Black Panther Malcolm Haywood it's just another wrong door police raid in the War on Drugs. So of course Malcolm is horrified when the grandson he's tried to protect, Nathaniel, returns from serving in Afghanistan only to find another war zone at home - and one where young Black men like Nathaniel are in the crosshairs! Meanwhile the Mayor and the Police Chief - one desperate for votes, the other desperate to fund his militarized police force - ramp up the fear (and their shiny new tank) to fight the newest, drug threat to America... worse than weed, meth, coke, crack, or crank, it's... SNORF!! And, of course, the SNORF trade is centered in the.. darkest... part of town...

Are the police out of control? What happened to "innocent until proven guilty"? Is Malcolm's neighbor Lluis (an undocumented immigrant,) actually a SNORF-lord? And can Malcolm convince his grandson that it is safer to re-up and fight overseas than to try to survive here at home, in Freedomland?


 Production Photo
Photographer: Rog Franklin
- It's the Freedomwagon 3000! -
Michael Gene Sullivan (Mayor Henderson) in
Freedomland.

Honors, Reviews and Articles:

Freedomland was voted winner of "Outstanding Performance by the Ensemble of a Musical" and nominated for three other awards: "Outstanding World Premiere Musical", "Outstanding Direction", & "Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Principal Role in a Musical" by Theatre Bay Area awards!

"The show is high--energy and often hilarious while also serving as a sobering depiction of how entire segments of the population can be automatically seen as a threat because of the color of their skin in this supposedly "post-racial" society."
Marin IJ - 7/8/15

"Once again, the San Francisco Mime Troupe has produced an action-initiating play that deserves to be seen far and wide this very summer."
Talkin' Broadway - July 2015

"The production should break under the weight of its content aspirations, but playwright Sullivan and director Snow keep the pathos on simmer until the end. The laughs, served in a steady flow, are justly earned and make it almost too easily bearable to consider the tragic situation on display."
Examiner.com - 7/8/15

"The humor is broad, the music is catchy, and by the end, the audience is on their feet to the tune of "There can be no law till there's order / There can be no peace till there's justice." "Freedomland" never gives up. This is a new play with top commedia standards."
theatrestorm.com - 7/21/15

"Bravura performance." "Brilliant." "Freedomland stands out as one of the most thoughtful and sobering (of the Troupe's productions.) It is fraught with emotion and analysis. Call it, for want of a better phrase, a "musical tragedy," fueled with a polemicist's intensity, a Shakespearean reach, and a doo-wop dollop of tuneful songs. Freedomland rises to an important new level of radical criticism."
berkeleydailyplanet.com - 7/19/15
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