Review: Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: "Freedom’s Last Stand"

Freedom’s Last Stand

Written by Barry Rowell

Directed by Mia Y. Anderson

Music by Rob Mitzner and David Ross

Musicians: David Ross, Rob Mitzner, and Matthew Milligan

Presented by Peculiar Works Project at Target Margin’s Doxsee Theater

232 52nd St, Brooklyn, NYC

May 29-June 14, 2025

Photo by R. Z. Schell

Peculiar Works Project’s Freedom’s Last Stand, written by Barry Rowell and directed by Mia Y. Anderson, takes its audience deep into the fractured mind of an emerging domestic terrorist in the final hours of a deadly standoff. Set in a cabin in the Idaho woods, the production reconstructs not just a moment of crisis, but the ideological labyrinth that led there.

The story centers on Daniel Frey, a white man radicalized by a toxic mix of online conspiracies, white nationalist rhetoric, and masculine grievance. Trapped in a bunker with a gun, a guitar, and something that looks eerily like a body wrapped in a sheet, Daniel broadcasts his manifesto through social media, trains for a final confrontation, and unravels under the weight of his own delusions. Through a mix of real-time action, video projections, flashbacks, and musical numbers, the piece draws the audience into Daniel’s world, one that is terrifyingly familiar given our current cultural climate.

Keith Erik Brown gives a commanding, physically intense performance as Daniel. He navigates the role’s emotional volatility with precision, shifting between defiance, desperation, and moments of eerie calm. As his memory of his mother, Nomi Tichman delivers a surreal yet grounded turn, moving fluidly between affection and fanaticism. Kimi Handa Brown brings quiet strength and intelligence to Anna, a grad student whose attempt to study Daniel becomes a frame for the narrative as well as a mirror for her own vulnerability, while Jessica Threet’s Eleanor is sharply drawn – a charismatic schoolteacher with glittering streamers in her hair, whose casual radicalism is all the more disturbing for its quotidian charm.

Keith Erik Brown. Photo by R. Z. Schell

As Special Agent Mead, Catherine Porter anchors the production with a deeply empathic focus and restraint. Her scenes with Daniel provide the clearest corrective to the surrounding chaos, showing how institutional systems both enable and abandon men like him. Her projection of both tenderness and strength – the supremely agential agent – functions as sort of a psychic counterweight to Tichman’s powerless yet nevertheless deeply impactful mother figure, echoing the hellish trap of social entropy that informs Daniel’s actions and worldview. Cecily Lyn (Agent Stone) and Spencer Gonzalez (Agent Wood) provide moments of grim levity as field agents waiting for the signal to shoot, while Clara Francesca and Tim Hotchkin round out the cast as detached federal voices calling the shots from a distant D.C.

Jack Utrata is a phenom as the Propagandist, delivering a bombastic, eerily charismatic performance that blurs a parasocial line between satire and menace. What begins as a series of grainy, pre-recorded videos evolves into a live-wire presence in the theater. Utrata roams the house, sitting beside audience members, engaging them directly, and pulling them uncomfortably close to the hate he represents. His speeches, replete with legal conspiracy jargon, racist dog whistles, and cultish fervor are as absurd as they are bone-chillingly prescient. In a climactic sequence, he dances at center stage with Daniel’s mother (Tichman), a grotesque fusion of ideology and intimacy. While the ensemble is strong throughout, Utrata emerges as the production’s star – unsettling, magnetic, and disturbingly recognizable.

Kimi Handa Brown. Photo by R. Z. Schell

From the moment the industrial gate that functions as the theater’s front door loudly creaks to a close, the immersive design transforms Target Margin’s Doxsee Theater into a multimedia echo chamber. Projections of social feeds, conspiracy videos, and propaganda pieces run continuously, interwoven with surveillance chatter and live music from an onstage rock band. Daniel records social media videos, positioning his phone sometimes literally between his face and the audience while the videos are projected onto screens around the room, providing a sort of postmodern metacommentary on the tensions between society and the individual at the heart of the production. The band, occasionally joined by characters, similarly performs original songs that double as commentary. A particular standout is “The Ballad of Danny Freedom,” which begins as a self-aggrandizing anthem and is reframed by the band as a tragicomic profile of a deluded loner.

The live band, positioned near the surveillance command center, is essential to the show’s impact. Their musicianship is sharp, tight, and deeply responsive to the action onstage. More than background music, the band, grounded by David Brandon Ross’s haunting vocals, functions as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the narrative with biting irony and emotional clarity.

Rowell’s script leans into fragmentation, with scenes shifting between reality, memory, and hallucination. The use of fantasy, flashback, and media saturation makes it clear that Daniel’s world is as much constructed in his own mind as in the space around him. The disjointed rhythm demands attention, but the payoff is a layered, often disorienting experience that mirrors the confusion and paranoia of radicalization. As the action escalates toward its inevitable climax, characters often speak over each other amidst a super-saturation of words, a logorrhea creating an aural fabric reflective of the mental and informational chaos of ours and the characters’ epoch.

Keith Erik Brown and Catherine Porter. Photo by R. Z. Schell

Barry Rowell notes: “After I first explored this subject onstage in the ‘90s, I saw how beliefs once considered extremist and fringe are now being fully embraced by an alarming percentage of Americans today. I wanted the audience to be surrounded by the action so that they could experience how seductive this darkly attractive worldview can be.” And indeed he does. In fact, the production’s most striking feature is its refusal to offer easy answers. Rather than explain Daniel’s descent or present a redemptive arc, Freedom’s Last Stand lets the audience sit in discomfort. We are never far from his rage, and the play never lets us forget that this rage is not an aberration; rather, it’s part of something systemic, cultivated, and in some circles, celebrated. The immersive staging implicates all of us directly: the feeds, the hashtags, the slogans are all too recognizable, the very real and deeply disturbing corners of the world that we inhabit both on- and off-line.

-Noah Simon Jampol