Playwright Tori Sampson’s speculative account of the origins of the Black Panther’s powder keg, This Land Was Made, is narrated by an aspiring writer named Sassy. “Think of me as your time-traveling griot,” she sarcastically tells the audience, recalling the tradition of West African storytelling that has promulgated her endangered legacy.
The play Opening at the Vineyard Theater on Sunday The Manhattan act is an act of oral history rooted in the political awakening and Sampson’s personal connection at its core. “I’m not cocky,” Sampson clarified in his recent interview in the courtyard of the Marlton Hotel, a short walk from the theatre.
“Black Panther was like family to her,” Sampson said of her mother, who was orphaned at the age of three and raised by her aunt, who was a member of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s. She accompanied her aunt to rallies, where her activists became like kin and respect for blacks guided her.
Sampson’s mother, Wanda Louise Thompson, raised the playwright and her sisters (a twin and an older sister) in the “Black Power family,” first in Boston and then in North Carolina, where they were educated with some militancy. received. To value black beauty and culture. (For example, when her twin sister wanted a poster of Britney Spears, her mother insisted on two posters of a black artist.)
But being an orphan was also supposed to be part of Sampson’s inheritance. Her mother died of a pulmonary embolism when she was 13, and she became a state ward along with her twin sister, whom Ms. Sampson calls “my lifeline and compass.” After a year in orphanages, the twins petitioned to attend an all-black boarding school in Mississippi, where independence was conditional on high grades.
“I’m trying to connect myself with the past,” said Sampson, a 34-year-old Los Angeles resident who wrote the streaming TV series “Citadel” and “Hunters.” She has only recently begun to realize that her experience as an orphan is integral to her work. “I’ve always longed to understand what it’s like to have a family,” Sampson said. “Imagination runs wild and creates stories,” she says.
That impulse echoes through “This Land Was Made,” set in a Bay Area pub, where soul food is simmering in the back kitchen. “I wanted to write a story about Huey P. Newton walking into a bar and changing the lives of the people there forever,” Sampson said of the Black Panther Party co-founder. When she learned that Newton’s rise to fame began with an unsolved mystery, she came up with the idea for the play, which combines the conventions of historical fiction and sitcoms.
The facts of this ambiguous incident are as follows. In 1967, Newton and his friend were pulled over during a traffic stop in Oakland, California, Newton was shot in the abdomen, and a police officer was shot dead. Newton was indicted and later convicted of spontaneous murder. (His conviction was eventually overturned.) The “Free Huey” rallies helped spark the Black Power movement.
So, Sampson wondered, if Newton didn’t pull the trigger, who did? And what impact did Newton have on his neighbors before his activism grew to an international scale?In the play, Sampson’s narrator, Sassy, hears the truth through word of mouth. claimed to be. “This Land Was Made” then unfolds as a comedy and a call to action.
Sampson said she also inherited her taste for social justice humor from her mother. Thompson didn’t let his kids watch much TV (just one hour a day of The Cosby Show), but he loved “All in the Family,” a format that skewered prejudice. I thought it was the ultimate. The show’s creator, Norman Lear, remains a source of inspiration for Sampson, who likes to wind up and unwind characters to elicit eye-popping laughs.
“Tori has in mind the specific tempo of each character and how the ensemble is structured musically,” the play’s director, Taylor Reynolds, said of Sampson’s conversational ear. In fact, both women said the production was deep in technical rehearsal until Ms. Sampson opened her eyes to watch the play.
“You can say the wrong thing out loud,” Sampson said of his Leah-influenced psyche. “Just give them faith and don’t hold them back.”
Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, where Sampson’s play was performed “If it’s cute and ugly and painful, it must be Muffakka.” published in 2019, said her work exhibited “a tireless search for an identity that feels both global and deeply personal.” A sharp and raucous delivery of Eurocentric beauty standards, “If Pretty Heart” is punctuated by a fourth-wall-breaking monologue, drawing on Sampson’s personal experience to explore the body image challenges black women face. I am asking about pressure. (The New York Times critic Jesse Green called the play “a lucky professional playwright’s debut.”)
“This Land Was Made” builds on the conventions of realism, but shows Sampson’s interest in how social structures shape power imbalances. (Sampson holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Ball State University.) The Oaklanders in the play discuss colorism, assimilation, and the fallacy of trusting the system, and promote Newton’s broader ideology about blacks. It embodies the tension.
But Sampson, who started This Land Was Made in 2014 as a sophomore at Yale University, now known as the David Geffen School of Drama, has managed to bring the American civil rights movement to a human scale. We are also aiming to
In addition to exploring their role in instigating a reverberating political tide, Sampson said, “I wanted to talk about lowercase p Panthers as humans.” Over the past decade, incidents of police violence have become more prominent, often captured on video during traffic stops, as Sampson envisioned onstage, but failing to recognize black humanity. The impact of is only increasing.
A conversation with a former Black Panther was also, more or less incidentally, important to Sampson’s research process. She spoke with her wife’s permission to Ed Brines, the noted playwright and former party culture minister who was hospitalized in 2014 (Mr Sampson’s godfather happened to be his was the attending physician). Funny cats,” Brines, who died in 2021, told Sampson of the party’s co-founders Newton and Bobby Seale.
The playwright was also interviewed Kathleen CleaverCleaver, now a retired law professor, became the first woman to hold a leadership position in the party after speaking at Yale University.
If Sassy’s statement that “every great story is about a journey to find a home” is true, then Sampson’s work will continue to venture in many directions. She’s developing a play about a nerdy comedian who embarks on a superhero adventure to retrieve her black card after mispronouncing Tupac Shakur’s name during sex. (“It’s a big deal,” she said.) And for the first time, she directly addresses her experiences as an orphan in an animated series called How to Succeed Without Parents.
“It always looks different,” Sampson said of her thoughts on her home. “My life wasn’t a box, so my mind doesn’t work that way.”
