MIAMI'S OWN April Yvette Thompson RETURNS TO MIAMI
IN THE ACCLAIMED PLAY LIBERTY CITY
FOR TWO-WEEK LIMITED RUN,
OPENING FEBRUARY 18 THROUGH MARCH 1 AT CARNIVAL STUDIO THEATER,
ADRIENNE ARSHT CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS OF MIAMI-DADE COUNTY
Timely as today's headlines, Miami will welcome home one of its own, Wednesday, February 18 at 7:30 P.M. when April Yvette Thompson, who grew up in the heart of the city during the turbulent 1970s and '80s, will open a two-week run of her acclaimed one-person show co-written and directed with Jessica Blank, LIBERTY CITY, at the Carnival Studio Theater of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.
LIBERTY CITY will make its Miami premiere on the crest of its New York success where Thompson was nominated for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Solo Performance. Variety, the "bible" of show business, welcomed LIBERTY CITY as an "exceptional performance with scorching insight on how history both frees and chains us at the same time."
Thompson knows Miami's Liberty City. It's where urban and island cultures rub up against each other, and it's where she grew up with her Bahamian/Cuban father and Aftrican American mother. Now she brings to life that neighborhood as it was during her childhood - in the '70s and '80s. It was from this experience that Thompson drew the substance of her work, both gritty and provoking.
Blending fact and fiction while exploring race and activism, family, politics, and the radical legacies of the '60s, Thompson tells her story as a startling synthesis of documentary realism and imaginative fiction defined by New York's Village Voice as "a definitive example of the solo show." For Blank, LIBERTY CITY became another exercise in the power of truth, illustrated in her acclaimed play, co-written with Erik Jensen, The Exonerated.
LIBERTY CITY will have sound by Jane Shaw, video by Tal Yarden and Keith Skretch, and lighting by Fletch McCune.
LIBERTY CITY will be performed February 18 - March 1. Tickets are $40 to $45 with evening performances Wednesday-Sunday at 7:30 P.M., matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 P.M. For group discount information, please call 786.468.2326. Additional information is available online at www.arshtcenter.org.
