Artistic Goals
Our goal as writers, and as actor and director, is to create theater that grapples with challenging questions, strips political “issues” down to their human essence, and reaches beyond the proscenium—and the theater’s usual audience—to change hearts and minds. Theater that is intimately engaged with the struggles and dreams of real people; theater that speaks to the “real world,” intellectually rigorous, deeply felt, politically engaged theater that matters.

In creating liberty city we’ve devised a kind of hybrid documentary/fiction methodology. That methodology is at the heart of the kind of play we want to make: one that tells a true story, but at the same time transcends the “real” to tap into the archetypal. One that reaches into history and pulls out the raw, beating, individual hearts; that shows us how “politics” is made up of families and their struggles, how our loves and flaws and strivings shape our history, and how that history shapes us.

Writing Methodology
April and Jessica first met in workshops for The Exonerated, a documentary play Jessica wrote with Erik Jensen based on interviews they conducted with over forty exonerated death row inmates. We worked together throughout The Exonerated's development; April was a member of the Off-Broadway cast as well as the film. During that period, we started to talk about creating a solo show together.

For several months, we gathered, tape recorder running, while Jessica interviewed April utilizing the techniques she had developed for The Exonerated. These techniques include a kind of deep, connective listening, combined with ways of questioning and reframing that encourage the subject to answer in story. Our documentary theater methodology is based in a deep respect for the subject and a focus on drawing out, translating, and distilling the essence of their story, rather than on journalistic “information gathering.” Using these techniques, it quickly became apparent that April came from an extraordinary family, one that encompassed and embodied an enormous amount of cultural, political and most importantly human territory; one that could both ground our play in the personal and enable us to tell a much larger story as well.

We realized that the story of how the sixties turned into the eighties—and the effect that had on the people and families who had staked all their hope on the waves of change the sixties initiated—was a story that had not been fully told. We realized that both of us, in different ways, are products of that transition: Jessica’s mother attended the first major anti-Vietnam War protest the same day her dad shipped off as part of the 1963 doctors' draft; and even though Jessica wouldn't be born for nearly another fifteen years, living in an antiwar activist veteran household shaped and defined her childhood. We also realized that this underexplored transitional moment in our history has a lot to tell us about who we are as Americans and the struggles that continue in different forms today.

It quickly became clear that April’s family should be the center of this play. Eventually, our interviews became a nearly 400-page transcript; we pored through it together, identifying which stories moved us, made us laugh, made us uncomfortable, challenged us: in short, which stories could make theater. April dove deep into all of them, digging into her family’s oral histories, and Jessica began to interview her in character, as she re-told the same stories from multiple family members’ points of view. As soon as April got on her feet and we allowed the characters to take over, our previous documentary-based techniques melted away and stories began to cross-pollinate and feed each other. Real events morphed into the fictional and the symbolic. As April told and retold her family's stories from multiple points of view, truth merged with perception merged with imagination, and her stories took on lives much larger than themselves.

This is the style we are in the process of developing: one that inhabits the territory where documentary and fiction overlap; that starts from real events and then expands them to get at the more archetypal, larger struggles they illustrate. One that utilizes the personal to humanize the political, and the political to illuminate the personal.

Our artistic influences span from the pioneers of this genre—Anna Deavere Smith, Emily Mann, Whoopi Goldberg—to others who at first glance might seem to have nothing to do with the theater, but whose lives and work seamlessly integrate profound humanity, intellectual rigor, and a deep engagement with the politics of the larger world—Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, Mira Nair, Barbara Kingsolver, and Allen Ginsberg.

Jessica Blank--Director's Statement
As co-writer and actor, April brings an enormous amount of richness, history, depth and emotional availability to our work on liberty city. As co-writer and director, my job is above all to function as a container: to both hold and shape the liquid of her stories. In our writing process, my role has been to draw out the material, and then to structure, crystallize, streamline and clarify; to listen for the "hot spots," identify and expand on them; to find the connective tissue and the skeleton, and to strengthen both. As director, my job is similar, except that the "material" now includes both the text and the performance.

Much of liberty city's power is rooted in April's ability to skillfully and compassionately inhabit members of her family in all their flawed and complex beauty, to expand her own perception enough to include and imagine theirs--and to physically transform into them in performance. Given that, the play's design aesthetic will be minimalist and geared toward highlighting those transformations. In a full production, we envision using a simple set that integrates elements from each of liberty city’s major characters, as well as rear projections and/or video to help evoke the gritty, bright chaos of 1970s Miami; liberty city takes place in a very particular historical moment, and it's crucial that the physical life of the play reflect that. I also plan to work with sound and music to reflect the lively, polyglot milieu--Cuban, African-American, Bahamian; "old world" and new--in which liberty city's action unfolds. At this stage of the play's development, however, my focus as a director is necessarily less on design elements (which will be minimalist in any case) and much more on text, story and characterization.

I believe firmly that performance exists to serve the text, not the other way around. Too much solo work depends solely on the dynamism of the performer; while April has that dynamism in abundance, we are both deeply committed to creating a play that is driven by a powerful, watertight narrative: a strong skeleton that supports the story fully and efficiently, and a narrative throughline that is smooth, active, and uninterrupted.

Because liberty city has been created in part through improvisational work, text and performance necessarily impact each other as they evolve. As we work rigorously to shape and strengthen the narrative, we are also working to develop the performance, beginning with precise and specific characterization. liberty city requires the actor to move seamlessly between male and female, old and young, Bahamian and American. April also plays a theatricalized version of "herself" as narrator--because she is speaking scripted text, this requires as much characterization as any of the other roles. liberty city also asks the actor not only to perform monologues but also to play several two-character scenes with herself. These scenes, in particular, require enormous precision and attention to detail. My job is to help draw out and shape the physical, vocal, and rhythmic life of each of these characters so that they are precise, defined, distilled and alive; as well as to look carefully at transitions—from character to character and from scene to scene—and examine where those transitions can be accomplished through directorial and design choices, vs. where they are accomplished by the text.

I'm also particularly interested in developing the dynamics of the piece: crescendos and diminuendos, shifts and builds in pacing, pitch and rhythm. Ultimately, the piece should flow and sing: it should take both the actor and the audience on a ride through hilarity and heartbreak, high intensity and quiet intimacy and many shadings in between. April and I continue to work together on discovering and defining moments and micromoments, and exploring and calibrating emotion. She and I trained with the same acting teachers and share a performance vocabulary, which has proven enormously helpful in working with moments (the basic unit of measurement in acting, much as the note is in music) and emotional life. As the text evolves, so will these aspects of performance.

April and I have worked together as co-writers for over two years; this stage of development requires us to continue to work as writers, and at the same time begin to work as actor and director. We need to move with ease between these two modes as we continue to work rigorously to shape the text. As a director, I’m interested not only in helping to develop and calibrate April’s performance, but also in testing the strength and durability of the narrative we’ve developed, and discerning between script issues and directorial/performance issues. As April and I continue to develop her performance, I am paying close attention to how that performance serves--and is affected by the evolution of the text.