If you follow the news (and I don’t necessarily recommend it), you’re well aware that stories about immigration, from every conceivable angle, often make the headlines – particularly in a state like Texas. Though fictional, Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City, now playing at 4th Wall Theatre Company, offers its own angle, and it’s not to be missed.
A post-9/11 Newark, New Jersey, is the sanctuary city of Majok’s play. It’s in this time and place we meet two teenagers, high school students, who are both undocumented immigrants. We never learn their names, their characters designated only as B (Luis Quintero) and G (Raven Justine Troup) in the program.
B shares an apartment with his mother, and G lives with her mother and an abusive step-father. Afraid an investigation would result in her and her mother being separated and potentially detained behind wire at some detention center, she regularly skips school and, along with B, makes up excuses – flu, cold, chicken pox – to hide the abuse. She also frequently sleeps over. Longtime friends, their relationship is close, intimate, but not quite romantic (though when G suggests B’s mother will think they’re sleeping together sleeping together, his disagreement earns a “Why the fuck not?” from G). Still, it’s clear the pair have a strong bond and a well-established rhythm to their interactions.
That rhythm is interrupted with B’s mother decides to “go back.” Back where is never specified, but fearful of living in the U.S. post-September 11th (and regularly being taken advantage of by her boss), she gives B a choice: Stay alone or return with her to a place he hasn’t seen in 10 years. Soon after, G’s mother surprises her with a restraining order on her step-father, a moving company to take them away and, most importantly, news that she’s become a citizen through naturalization. More than that, citizenship automatically transfers to G since she’s still under 18.
Earlier we saw B upset that he’s unable to apply for financial aid, angrily noting that his very existence is criminal. Now, G can and does decide to go to college. With their paths suddenly diverging, it’s not long before G asks the question: “I’m a citizen. How can I help?” It turns out to be a question answered with an engagement ring, but to say anything more might rob you of the experience if you haven’t yet seen Sanctuary City – and you should, no question.
Sanctuary City is a captivating 90-minute, intermission-less play that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Literally, there were folks on the edges of theirs seat during the performance. But that’s not because it’s some kind of whodunit. It’s due to Majok’s incredible ability to fully realize her characters and the difficult world they’re trying to navigate through quick flashes, time jumps, repetition and one unexpected shift in storytelling. The play’s jumpiness keeps you on your toes, the repeated scenes – coming up with new excuses, the night time thank yous and good nights, dinner announcements – settle you into the rhythm of B and G’s relationship. That relationship, like life, and the play itself, is interspersed with humor. It’s all crucial in further emphasizing the heartbreak when that rhythm is interrupted. In the process of it all, Majok creates something that is viscerally understandable and demanding of your attention. She brings humanity – in all its complicated and familiar glory – to the headlines, to the news reports, to the intellectual arguments about immigration, and it’s a gut punch.
Director Philip Lehl beautifully realizes this play. Jodi Bobrovsky’s clever set of solid brick and wooden planks is dock-like and perfectly utilized. It further emphasizes B and G’s relationship to each other; they are each other’s port in a storm, a source of comfort and refuge in a world that does not welcome them. The brutalist set proves to be a chameleon in Lehl’s hands and under Dan Jones’s lighting designs. Illuminated from above and below, it’s a fire escape, an apartment, a bus station, prom night.
Along with the evocative acting – and without any distraction from Macy Lyne static, but note-perfect costumes – it’s Jones and sound designer Robert Leslie Meek’s choices that move us seamlessly from scene to scene, location to location. And that’s no easy feat, as the first part of the play moves at a break-neck pace before slowing down to one long, uninterrupted conversation set three years later. The easy dynamic between B and G disappears. Their prior pas de deux disrupted by another. Props, which had been absent suddenly start to appear. The world becomes unrecognizable and it’s brutal.
But one big reason the play is as powerful as it is? The actors. Enough can’t be said about the terrific cast that Lehl stewards. Troup’s G is the right mix of tough and vulnerable. She’s just as believable sizing up some unseen rando and saying “I can take him” – and meaning it – as she is uncertain and churlish under heartbreak and something akin to survivor’s guilt.
Quintero appears more frayed around the edges as B, the fault lines starting to appear well before he utters the line, “I’m not doing well.” He’s trapped in some kind of limbo and he knows it, with the anguish of the situation spilling out at times. Together, their chemistry is undeniable, their rapport charming and engrossing.
The play’s interloper is law student Henry, played by Christian Tannous. He unsteadies the balance of the production perfectly and his interactions with Troup, both adversarial and territorial, are a welcome addition to the show.
At one point during the show, as G prepares to move out of the apartment she shared with her abuser, she mentions missing the place. When B questions her, she says, simply, she lived there longer than anywhere else. It’s fairly common for works of art, such as plays, to explore societal problems and timely issues as Sanctuary City does. But not every show can so succinctly note the human messiness that comes along with such situations. Even less common, I imagine, is for a theater company to take such a compelling work and stage it as deftly, as stunningly, and as successfully as 4th Wall is doing it over at Spring Street Studios. And if that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.
Performances will continue at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays (with a pay-what-you-can night on Monday, April 10) through April 15 at Spring Street Studios, 1824 Spring Street, Studio 101. For more information, call 832-767-4991 or visit 4thwalltheatreco.com. $17-$53.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
