Fall of Freedom: NYTW Community Reflects on How to “Reclaim the Flag”

Throughout the weekend of November 21st, artists and activists gathered in hundreds of events across the country as part of Fall of Freedom, “an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation.” In answering this call, New York Theatre Workshop collaborated with FABnyc to cultivate an evening of creativity, conversation, and community, complete with live performances and a screening of Reclaim the Flag, a documentary created by Bruce Cohen and Alexis Bittar.
 

An audience member adds to the wall of prompts.

Last Friday evening in the lobby of FABnyc’s theatre space on E 4th St, guests mixed and mingled over light bites, including desserts from Eat Offbeat, a collective of immigrant culinary talents who also run a café nearby on Great Jones St at actress Angelina Jolie’s “Atelier Jolie.” When the doors to the house of the theatre opened, the audience found their seats, after first writing responses to prompts on the wall, including “I feel most free when…” and “In the future, I hope we all have…” Beneath the prompt “Art gives me the courage to…” read one person’s words in purple marker: “speak the truth.”

The program began with moving remarks from the Executive Director of FABnyc, Ryan Gilliam, who welcomed room with an acknowledgement of the history of the neighborhood. NYTW’s Managing Director Maya Choldin and Artistic Director Patricia McGregor shared a few more words, explaining the inception of the Workshop’s participation in Fall of Freedom: a phone call from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage to McGregor, inviting her to put something together for the program. She knew quickly what she hoped to do: to screen Cohen and Bittar’s Reclaim the Flag for the Workshop’s surrounding community and broader public.

The room then turned its attention to a large screen, watching the opening frames of the documentary, in which actress and producer Kelly Marie Tran wipes away a tear while holding a small American flag. Throughout the film, dozens of influential leaders and voices in the LGBTQ+ community share their thoughts on the American flag and its associations with everything from hope to fear. Alongside these speakers, audiences consider: what does the flag mean, and how can we reclaim it? Within the audience sat Cohen and Bittar themselves, as well as author and activist Raquel Willis, who is interviewed in the documentary. “There’s been centuries of missed opportunities to rectify the ills of this country,” Willis states in the film.
 

Liza Jessie Peterson performing part of The Peculiar Patriot.

Following the film, McGregor shared a brief reflection on the importance of liveness and the power of being together, segueing the evening seamlessly into a trio of live performances. Writer and performer Liza Jessie Peterson first shared excerpts from her play, The Peculiar Patriot, which she will perform at the Workshop this coming spring, in association with National Black Theatre and Lena Waithe, as part of the In the Bricks Festival. Peterson plays Betsy LaQuanda Ross who, like the character’s namesake, weaves a quilt amidst her visits to friends who are incarcerated. The monologues Peterson performed rang with relevance, echoing the powerful reflections about the flag heard just prior during the film.

Following Peterson, three students from the Workshop’s youth ensemble, the Youth Artistic Instigators, performed a short piece devised specially for the event. In making their piece, titled “Child of the American Dream,” the students read the poem A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde, wrote their own text inspired by Lorde’s words, and then combined their writing with emotionally driven movement. Their words lingered in the space with thought-provoking urgency: “As children of immigrants / Who hold this country on their back / This world cannot wake up from this dream / How can we stop this clock from setting us back?”

Lastly, NYTW Usual Suspect Heidi Schreck performed an abbreviated section from the beginning of her play, What the Constitution Means to Me, which she performed at the Workshop in 2018 before it moved to Broadway. All three of the live performances joined into dialogue with the documentary about the complicated relationship between those living in this country, the rights we are promised, and our uneasy feelings of patriotism or lack thereof.
 

Heidi Schreck holds a small American flag passed out after the film.

McGregor and Gilliam concluded the event with some final words of encouragement to continue the conversation, to continue thinking about the role we can take on right now through activism, advocacy, and artistry.

“This is why we made the film,” Cohen said at the conclusion of the event. His goal was “to have people watch it and experience it and think about how we got to this place in our country, how we got to this place with the American flag, and then hopefully to start thinking about what to do about that.” Cohen remarked how moved he felt hearing the audience’s reactions as they watched the film, even their laughter at a few moments throughout.

“This really brought home for me the whole point of Fall of Freedom and how it’s trying to activate us, to think about how art can be part of the solutions we need to find.”

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First released to the public in July 2025, the documentary Reclaim the Flag is available to watch on YouTube. All photos above by Adam Fontana (@fontana_fotography).

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Categories: 2025/26 Season. Tags: Fall of Freedom and The Peculiar Patriot.