OAKLAND TRIBUNE
MARCH 2000
A different face on Huey Newton legacy
Three and 1/2 Stars
By Chad Jones
STAFF WRITER

CHANCES are if the talented writer/actor Michael Gene Sullivan looked like Nipsey Russell, he could turn that resemblance into an engrossing play. But the fact is, Sullivan looks like Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton. So that's what his new one-man show is about.

"Did Anyone Ever Tell You You Look Like Huey P. Newton?" which opened Thursday at San Francisco' Eureka Theatre, is a story of identity and coming to terms with who you are in relation to the person you most resemble. In Sullivan's case, he shares facial features with a complicated, controversial man, a man some revere and others revile.

"Imagine it's just after the Revolutionary War except we're all black just lost," Sullivan says. "Then imagine someone comes up to you and says, 'You look like George Washington. 'How is that going to make you feel?"

The resemblance to Newton probably wouldn't be that big a deal for Sullivan had he not grown up in a activist family in the 1960s. Sullivan was raised to care about the big issues and recalls the first rally he attended with his family.

He was 5, and a large group of anti-Vietnam War protesters gathered outside a hotel in Los Angeles where President Lyndon Johnson was holding a meeting. The Sullivan family was front and center because, as Sullivan says, "We were never at the back of a march."

With the arrival of the police, the protest turned violent, and Sullivan and his family sought refuge behind a tiny tree.

This whole episode is one of many brought beautifully to life through Sulivan's vivid, charismatic performance. Under the sure-handed direction of Velina Brown, who, like Sullivan, is a company member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the mostly bare stage becomes an epic playground full of history, passion and self-discovery.

Every time someone tells Sullivan he looks like Newton, a story about the infamous Black Panther is sure to follow.

A man who stops to help Sullivan re-charge his car battery recalls going to the Black Panthers School as a child. An elderly clerk in a grocery store says, "Huey was a revolutionary" and says it with obvious pride, while a man working out in a gym tells Sullivan, "Huey was a thug," and says it with loathing, and contempt.

The question for Sullivan, and one for which he cannot find a simple answer, becomes: Is the resemblance to Newton a good thing or a bad thing?

There's good, Sullivan says, in the power of the revolution and the Black Panthers' mission to fight repression and violence against blacks. Not so good was a change in Newton when he was released from prison after being convicted of a policeman's murder and his attention turned to drugs, violence and rape.

As he struggles with this question throughout the 90 minute show, Sullivan creates a wonderful array of characters, from a paranoid anti-Communist schoolteacher to a 7-year old boy trying valiantly to stay awake while watching the late returns during the 1968 presidential election.

Sullivan mentions that his mother was standing near Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. She said if Kennedy had ducked, he would only have been wounded.

"Why can't people on our side learn to duck? If they'd duck, they'd only be wounded. Wallace and Reagan were only wounded. Our guys are never just wounded," he says. Then he turns around and sings the lyrics to the theme from "Star Trek" - "I'll bet you didn't know it had words" before launching into a defense of William Shatner's acting. "Passionate times call for over-acting," Sullivan says.

Perhaps that explains the few moments of actorly indulgence when Sullivan overplays scenes that call for quieter emotions. But you have to hand it to him for creating a show that has a social conscience as well as a core of personal truth. "All power to the people," Newton used to say.

All power to Sullivan for trying to make some sense of Newton's troubled legacy.