Home Girl Makes Good
An actress brings her stories of growing up in Liberty City home to Miami

Miami native April Yvette Thompson in her solo show, Liberty City Photo: Jill Jones

“Statistically, I’m supposed to be on drugs and have a crack dealer for a boyfriend,” says April Yvette Thompson, who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Miami’s Liberty City.

But Thompson is not a statistic. She is a Vassar graduate, an accomplished actress, a co-creator of Liberty City, a one-woman show she will perform at the Studio Theatre at the Arsht Center in Miami February 18 through March 1.

Thompson created Liberty City with Jessica Blank, who also directs the show. The two women became friends about six years ago while working on The Exonerated, which Blank co-wrote with husband Erik Jensen.

One night during a party at Thompson's house, Blank had an idea.

“There were about 15 people at the party, and at one point I looked around and realized that April had been talking for almost an hour and everyone at the party was riveted,” says Blank. “I knew she was an incredible actor, but I realized that she was also an incredible solo performer.”

Thompson believes she inherited her storytelling talent from her grandmother, whom she says had “the gift of the mythic storyteller.”

Jessica Blank, so-creator and director of Liberty City

“I love a good yarn,” says Thompson, “and I remember the details of how people made me feel a certain time in my life.”

Blank approached Thompson that night and asked if she’d ever thought about doing a solo show. Unbeknownst to Blank, Thompson had been working on a show based on narratives of ex-slaves, but hadn’t quite put all the pieces together.

Blank told Thompson that night that she would write a show for Thompson, although she admitted she had no idea what the show would be about.

The two friends began meeting, looking for a story to tell with a strong narrative core. Blank interviewed Thompson using documentary theatre techniques, and Thompson, using her gift of storytelling, recalled stories of people she knew and people she grew up with in Liberty City.

“It quickly became clear that she came from an extraordinary family,” says Blank.

Although Thompson’s upbringing in Liberty City and Blank’s childhood in New Haven, Connecticut seem worlds apart, the two women found common ground. Both see themselves as children of the 1960s, and come from progressive, politically-oriented families.

April Yvette Thompson

The marathon interview sessions occurred over the course of a year. They went through about 400 pages of interview transcripts, picking out the stories with the most theatrical potential. Thompson then did “imaginative work” around those stories, and later, Blank conducted a second round of interviews with Thompson, who portrayed the characters she had created. The monologues of Liberty City were born.

“Ultimately, the final story we told is a lovely mix of fact and fiction,” says Thompson.

While the characters are based on Thompson’s family, some characters are an amalgamation of several family members as well as archetypes of the era.

Liberty City encompasses 18 years, from 1970 to 1988. Thompson says that it’s as much about the people in her family and those she knew growing up as it is about Miami.

“These fantastic immigrants were like, ‘Why can’t we rule our city like a country? We can do whatever we want. Our city is our country.’ There’s something about the immigrant spirit of Miami that is like no place else,” says Thompson. “That’s America in Miami.”

April Yvette Thompson in Liberty City Photo: Joan Marcus

It’s also an unvarnished look at the family she grew up in.

Thompson says that when her family came to see Liberty City in New York, a woman sitting next to her aunt commented on the amount of profanity and sordid family details.

“My aunt said, “Well, we curse a lot. If she didn’t have the cursing we would have said who the hell are these people.’”

This is only the second full production of Liberty City; it was produced off-Broadway in early 2008.

Over the course of the interviews with Blank, Thompson says she discovered some important things about herself and her relationship with her family.

“I didn’t know how much I adored them and how much I admired them,” says Thompson. “ It helped me gain an appreciation for how privileged I was. My family saw possibilities for me that were far beyond what they’d experienced.”

Thompson attended Treasure Island Elementary School, and later Ransom Everglades, which her father had heard was the best school in the area. Even though the tuition at the private school was beyond the family’s means, they were committed to seeing Thompson get a first-class education. They took on extra jobs in order to come up with the money for tuition, tutors, uniforms and whatever else Thompson needed. And all her father asked was that she work hard and keep up her grades. Whenever there were obstacles, the family’s attitude was twofold: “What are you going to do about it?” followed by “We’ll figure it out.”

April Yvette Thompson plays characters based on her family in Liberty City Photo: Jill Jones

Thompson regularly returns to Miami for the holidays, and marvels at the evolution of the city. Being black from a Latin and Caribbean background with a white, Jewish grandfather, Thompson faced some discrimination. But now when she visits Miami, she sees ethnicities getting along professionally and socially in a way she never saw in Miami before.

“It’s such a unique place with its own world view, and I believe I am a fairly accurate representation of what that looks like,” says Thompson. “Now, here I am coming back as an artist, with a white girl as a partner and collaborator, which is the product of what everyone marched and fought for. We get to have the privilege of creating art for a living, something that when I grew up was not a realistic possibility. We are the fruit of much labor and suffrage and strife. I hope that there’s an appreciation for that. I hope that they see that Liberty City is a love letter to the activism of those men and women who created possibility in my life.”

And Thompson pays tribute to those men and women in other ways as well. As an actress, Thomson refuses to accept roles of hookers or addicts or servants. When deciding whether or not to take a role, Thompson thinks about whether a little girl could watch her and feel possibility for herself. If the answer is no, Thompson will not take the role.

“I tell my agent that my aunt and my mother cleaned white ladies’ floors so that they could buy suits at Nieman-Marcus and come and see me graduate from Vassar,” says Thompson. “I can’t diminish that by playing servants. Too many people gave up too much for me.”

Liberty City runs February 18 through March 1 at the Studio Theatre at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Miami. For tickets and more information, visit www.arshtcenter,org.

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