Socialist Action /April 2000
He Really Does Look Like Huey Newton!
By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH
I thought it ironic that the night I went to see Michael Gene Sullivan's
solo performance, "Did Anyone Ever Tell You-You Look Like Huey P. Newton?"
an ex-Black Panther Party member and leader, H. Rap Brown, allegedly shot
and seriously wounded two sheriff's deputies near downtown Atlanta.
The deputies were serving a warrant for aggravated assault and weapons
possession at the home of Brown, now known as Muslim cleric Jamil Abdullah
Al-Amin. He fled. SWAT teams and police dogs searched homes in a cordoned
off, four-block area.
(As of this writing, one deputy has died. Al-Amin has been arrested and
is in custody, claiming conspiracy, and fighting extradition to Georgia.
His lawyer says Al-Amin is innocent.)
Michael Gene Sullivan does, indeed, look like Huey P. Newton-the founder,
in 1966, of the Black Panther Party, along with Bobby Seale. Sullivan grew
up in Los Angeles in a Black, leftist family in the '60s, looking cool in
a beret.
As a five-year-old, he listened to his parents discoursing on the effects
of economic imperialism on post-colonial Africa. He came to believe, along
with many Black leftists, that "the way to the American dream was through
revolution," and Huey P. Newton was "the god of revolution."
According to Sullivan, "Huey, Messiah of the Left, was going to
defeat the imperialists with one hand and create the socialist utopia with
the other." One day, someone told him he looked like Huey P. Newton.
His solo performance resulted from often being told of the resemblance,
as he grew into adulthood. So he sat down and wrote the piece over a four-year
period.
Sullivan's hour-and-a-half performance was based on stories people related
to him about Newton, after telling him that he looked like him. However,
he also touched on significant social and political events that shaped his
own life. One of the characters he portrayed was of a woman repairing his
bicycle in a bike shop, which he mimed with crisp clarity as he spoke. She
reminisced on how Huey Newton affected her life.
Diverging from the subject of Newton, he then took on the role of his
grade school teacher. Sullivan played her standing on top of a desk, rather
than sitting behind it, which made you recall your own experience of being
a second grader when teachers loomed large.
She tore up a picture he had drawn, during "art period," of
a yellow hammer and sickle against a red background. She taught skewed history
and geography, concerning the Russian communist scare. "Russia is right
across the Bering Straight, just a few miles from our state of Alaska!"
He realized during history that it's all about whites, as though Blacks
did not exist. During the teacher's slide show on Alaska, no pictures were
shown, just the glaring white screen, as though to symbolize the whiteness
of America. Her only mention of the natives was to say that they lived in
round houses made of ice.
The audience was encouraged to sing, like students, along with Sullivan
as teacher, the lyrics of "Of Thee I Sing" from a song book included
in the program. We also sang "Marching to Pretoria," when the
"teacher" explained how happy the Blacks were to be going off
to work.
Sullivan described an anti-war march he had attended with his parents.
He asked the audience to do the LBJ chant with him. A slide of a black and
white portrait of LBJ with swastikas on his collar, done by Sullivan's mother,
an artist, appeared on the screen. Zoomed in, the portrait revealed a distinctly
penis-like nose.
There was a tender moment when, in the character of his father, he knelt
down and fanned his young son's face during the march to cool him off, and
peeled him an orange. As himself, Sullivan depicted the sudden riot caused
by police storming on to the scene to break up the demonstration. The family
huddled near a tree on a traffic island in the middle of the street to avoid
being clubbed.
Sullivan effectively portrayed an old, old man who ran a store, while
sitting in a chair. The old man, too, remarked on Sullivan's resemblance
and reminisced about Newton, while waiting on people. He talked about the
three great leaders, Newton, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, all three
assassinated.
Now, as himself once more, Sullivan brought up Newton's trial and then
played the LA judge who was scared to death of Newton being on the loose,
freed on bail in Oakland. Sullivan acted out his frustration at trying to
find a book on the Black Panthers so he could learn more about his "double."
He went to a library, a socialist bookstore, and eventually found a book
on Bobby Seale.
There were some funny bits where he spoke of rules Black folks should
remember for the next revolution. The first one, based on the 1964 Watts
riot: "Don't burn your own shit." He said that a Black man killed
Malcolm X when Malcolm was just about to tell them whose stuff to burn.
Besides the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the other
devastating events for Sullivan, as a kid, were the Kennedy assassinations.
His mother, active in the Robert Kennedy campaign, was backstage at the
Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was shot. The FBI gave the family protection
because his mother had looked right into the eyes of the assassin. She feared
for her and her family's lives. Sullivan was driven to school in an FBI
limo, which gave him clout.
Sullivan, as himself as a young man at 22, portrayed his experiences
with racial profiling. He was accused by a cop of trying to steal his own
car when he had gone outside in the middle of the night to move it because
of street-cleaning.
He played the scene with such tension, there was not a sound in the audience.
We saw the cop through his eyes. We were Sullivan.
He was not allowed to explain, after being asked to get out of his car.
He was thoroughly searched and patted down, then forced to lie on the street,
spread-eagled. Each time he thought the officer had finished questioning
him, he started to get up, but was made to lie back down.
I kept thinking about Rodney King and Diallo and flinched each time Sullivan
made a move to reach for his wallet for his ID. Eventually, he was handcuffed,
humiliated, made to sit in the patrol car while cop checked his records;
he was arrested for past parking tickets.
Sullivan ended his performance by expressing the disillusionment he experienced
about his romanticized vision of Newton. Slides were shown of Newton in
the wicker royalty chair, in beret, black outfit, and weapon, another in
just a shirt and pants, in the same chair, and of other Black Panther Party
members.
People started telling him about Huey's decline. In the character of
his father as an older man during a workout session, he tried to tell Sullivan
that Newton was a thug and a drug addict. Sullivan defended Newton and said,
in effect, that those who denigrated Newton forgot about his breakfast programs,
the opening of schools and medical clinics for the poor people in the ghettos,
and the other good things.
Huey's downfall, Sullivan told us, came about as the result of FBI and
police pressure, drugs and crack. Then Huey was dead. And while the war
in Vietnam raged, Huey's soldiers at home were "dying in the trenches."
A sound track, with music from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix, and sound
effects accompanied his performance. Its volume sometimes drowned out Sullivan's
voice. At times the transition between his characters was rough, so it was
not clear, at first, whom Sullivan was portraying. But this was rare.
Sullivan has given us an important and timeless work, at a time when,
though there have been advancements for Blacks in some areas since the civil
rights movement of the 1960s, it seems as though equality among the races
is moving backward rather than forward. Consider the verdict in the Amadou
Diallo case, California's passing of Proposition 21 (which targets young
people of color), and the overthrow of affirmative action in California
and, recently, in Florida.
Michael Gene Sullivan is an engaging, focused actor and mime. I think
he is actually better looking than Huey P. Newton. The resemblance, however,
is uncanny. He feels he was born to champion the revolutionary leader and
to ask that people remember him not as he was at the end of his life, but
for what he had done to further the civil rights of Blacks in the United
States.
Sullivan is an actor, writer, director, and collective member of the
Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe and has performed in a half-dozen
of its productions-as well as with other professional companies in the Bay
Area.
He has also played his hero, Huey P. Newton, in "The Rise and Fall
of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party" at the Lorraine Hansberry
Theater in San Francisco. Other credits include television and films.
Socialist Action /April 2000 |