Paul Emery Music and the Miners Foundry will present the San Francisco Mime Troupe in an outdoor twilight concert on Friday, August 28, 2015. The San Francisco Mime Troupe will open their 56th Season with “Freedomland”, written by Michael Gene Sullivan with music and lyrics by Ira Marlowe. Doors open at 6:45 p.m., music begins at 7:00 p.m., and the show is at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available online, by phone or in person at the Miners Foundry, or in person at Briar Patch Co-Op. Ticketing fees may apply.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe creates and produces socially relevant theatre of the highest professional quality and performs it before the broadest possible audience. SFMT makes sense of the headlines by identifying the forces shaping our lives and dramatizing the operation of these giant forces in small, close-up stories that make audiences feel the impact of political events on personal life.
A door is blown off its hinges! Into a blasted room of scarred walls and shattered windows, armed with M-16s, America’s bravest duck and dodge for cover, finally training their deadly gun sights on… an old black man watching TV on his couch? This isn’t Baghdad or Kandahar, it’s 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 cross hairs! 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 of out 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’s safer to re-up and fight overseas than to try to survive here at home, in Freedomland?
