It’s Oakland, 1967, and the setting is Trish’s Bar, where locals drink, get haircuts, and argue.  Sassy (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), daughter of Miss Trish (Libya V. Pugh), is a waitress, barber, and aspiring social historian.  Her boyfriend, Troy (Matthew Griffin), is the young Republican type.  He believes hard work and assimilation will ensure his success: first he’ll be a prosecutor, then a judge, then a Supreme Court Justice.  Troy is described, not unfairly, as someone who “thinks a good time is proving a calculator wrong.”  Drew (Leland Fowler), on the other hand, is enamored with the Black Panthers.  He quits his job because he doesn’t want to work for a white man, and he decides he will address the women in the bar as “my Nubian Black Queens.”  You can imagine how Drew feels about Troy.  When Huey Newton (Julian Elijah Martinez) enters Trish’s, both these visions are tested.

Tori Sampson’s This Land Was Made takes its title from the Woody Guthrie song, itself a rebuttal to Irving Berlin’s jingoistic “God Bless America.”  Sassy, who is writing a history of Oakland, wants to title her manuscript Made for You and Me.  Sampson’s vision is less optimistic, I think, and her emphasis on the first part of the line draws attention to the word made: made by whom. For whom?  Sassy is narrating the story from the present, where her neighborhood has “changed so much” and her mother’s bar is “vacant, but standing.”  In Oakland, the meaning of “you and me” has changed in the over half century since 1967.

The play has some good moments, and Troy is given a particularly wrenching scene, when an encounter with the police leaves him shaken and he admits, “If I could give my Black back to God I would.”  This was greeted with gasps at the performance I attended.

But it’s also spread thin, taking on more ideas and characters than the runtime and structure can handle.  In addition to the ongoing debate between Troy and Drew, we have questions about the role of storytelling and the effect of the passage of time on our memories.  There is also the drama of the women who are left to pick up the pieces when patriarchal radicals run off into the world guns blazing.  Sampson’s choice to center the action around Newton’s real-life arrest by two Oakland police officers—all three were shot, one of the cops killed—just contributes to the clutter.  Still, with some pruning and focus, there is a good play in This Land Is Made.

This Land Was Made runs through June 25th at the Vineyard Theatre.  108 E. 15th Street  New York, NY.  2 hours.  One intermission. Photograph by Carol Rosegg.