This Land Was Made tickets

By: Tori Sampson
Director: Taylor Reynolds
Producer: Vineyard Theatre
Cast list: Antoinette Crowe-Legacy (as Sassy), Leland Fowler (as Drew), Matthew Griffin (as Troy), Sean Patrick Higgins (as Officer Heanes), Yasha Jackson (as Gail), Ezra Knight (as MR. FAR), Julian Elijah Martinez (as Huey), Curt Morlaye (as Gene), Oliver Palmer (as Officer Frey)
Design: Wilson Chin
Costumes: Dominique Fawn Hill
Lighting: Adam Honoré
Sound: Fan Zhang

Tori Sampson, the playwright of New York Times Critic's Pick If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be A Muhfucka, returns off Broadway with her latest work, This Land Was Made. Get This Land Was Made tickets on TodayTix now.

The This Land Was Made play takes place in 1967 at the Oakland bar Miss Trish's. In the streets, the Black Panther Party is kickstarting a social movement, protesting police brutality and calling for change. For the patrons inside, however, it's all just talk — until the force of the revolution walks through the door one day. Suddenly, taking action becomes a reality.

The play first premiered in Oakland with Ubuntu Theater Project in 2017. Vineyard Theatre first presented a developmental reading of This Land Was Made off Broadway in 2018, directed by Obie Award winner Whitney White. The fully staged Off-Broadway premiere is directed by Taylor Reynolds, who received her own Obie Award for directing Tambo & Bones in 2022. She's also an Obie Award winner for directing Man Cave, a Drama Desk nominee for Plano, and a Lucille Lortel Award winner for sustained excellence in her career.

This Land Was Made is Sampson's first Off-Broadway play since If Pretty Hurts. In her career, she has won the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting and been a finalist for other awards like the Lorraine Hansberry Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and Relentless Award.

Get tickets to This Land Was Made in New York on TodayTix.

What to Watch For

• Huey P. Newton, a co-founder and leader of the Black Panther Party, is a key character in the play. A woman who knew him saw the play's Oakland premiere and praised Sampson's depiction of him as flawed but trailblazing.
• Antoinette Crowe-Legacy, who starred in If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be A Muhfucka, also stars in This Land Was Made.
• The play takes its title from a lyric in the American folk song "This Land Is Your Land," written in 1940 by Woody Guthrie.
• Sampson's grandparents were members of the Black Panther Party, and she learned the party's values from her parents growing up, which inspired her to write This Land Was Made.
• Sampson has a master's in playwriting, but she didn't go to undergrad for theatre — she holds a B.S. in sociology from Ball State University.
• Another play of Sampson's, Cadillac Crew, centers on revolutionary movements — particularly women's roles in them.