‘Sanctuary City’ Offers Powerful Look at Immigration Issue

King Hang, Ashley Oviedo. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Next Act Theatre opened its new season with the most topical and provocative subject imaginable – Sanctuary City, a 2020 play set in the years 2001-2006 (yes, before Trump but it ends with his recorded rant about illegal immigrants). To avoid seeming too polemic or melodramatic, playwright Martyna Majok uses arresting theatrical concepts compressed into 90 minutes.

The first half is violently nonlinear on a bare stage with rapid pings, light changes, repetitive dialogue fragments and physical movement to simulate the various passages of time as immigrants grow into adulthood, plus the special intimacy developing between G (that’s a she) and B (that’s a he). Note how these immigrant children brought to this country by families desperate to make a better life do not have identities beyond initials, a slap at our policies that Dreamers endured even before there were confusing laws passed about Dreamers.

G’s mother will do anything to make money and gain citizenship, including looking the other way when her daughter faces sexual abuse. B’s mother brought him to America but is willing to abandon him to life as an unskilled worker despite his college potential as she returns home to Latin America without him.

G and B’s intimacies are not sexual, but the repetitive speeches, the grilling if you are stopped by ICE, the rapid flips as they lie akimbo or separate on a bare floor (we assume it is a bed in a dilapidated dingy apartment) are closer than sex, among the ways Majok suggests how these immigrants lead an unsettling life and an experience that few traditional Americans can contemplate.

When the linear half of the play arrives we are now in a modern apartment with furniture and they are clearly college age. We learn what we suspected, that there is a menage a trois involved, though not as portrayed in traditional sex farces.

No, Henry arrives, bearded and powerful and 100% American in his swagger, college degree and genuine affection for B the male. He arrives as G, now a naturalized citizen, is again suggesting she marry B to make him legal. As the three – often in anger – discuss the dilemmas and debate the limits of their commitments, the play reaches an entertaining, if not always believable, boiling point.

Along with comic moments and much sadness at the dilemmas facing this ever growing underclass of American life, the play gives audiences a full dose of moral issues to contemplate, along with the strange rules about how you are examined by officials, what lies you have to tell to avoid being arrested and what sort of special understanding can form among these “illegals.” Nor does the play hide the emotional rage that accompanies all this.

I don’t think Sanctuary City hangs together as naturalistically and emotionally as did Renaissance Theaterworks 2013 production with disabled actors of Majok’s Pulitzer winning Cost of Living.

I’m not sure it could, so complicated is the world where children cling to each other in the dark, unchanged as they grow older, trying to outguess the rules about how to become a citizen or how not to be arrested for walking down the street.

Still, Majok and her gift for dialogue is a formidable new voice and her bravery trying new ways to attack theater forms should be heeded, reminding us that theater that today seems only topical is breathing life into issues of long endurance. It is admirable as well how far into theatrical stylings she has gone to prevent seeming to take advantage of a story still in the news.

The play is also a challenge to the cast and crew, which have expended considerable detail in creation. You can’t fault the clever ideas of director Jake Penner, aided by sound designer Willow James and scenic/lighting designer Jason Fassl, to keep the motion, pings and fascination with the physical movement riveting in the first half, though I will argue that the two lead actors need more time to find all the realities and quicksilver meanings of the dialogue.

Ashley Oviedo as G shrewdly manages to subtly suggest, not belabor, the sexual abuse she faced in her mother’s home. The actress, who is better known to Milwaukee audiences for her musical theater turns, also has some key moments handling explosive dialogue in the later going.

As B, King Hang is a strong presence, though like Oviedo, there is more stuff to find in the first half, to keep us from feeling the actor is jumping into different personalities. The jumpiness becomes clearer, and more a genuinely talented dramatic form, in the second half, when Hang can marry his acting to his larger character insecurities.

As Henry, Joe Lino is quite believable as an angry but compassionate insider reduced to an outsider (nice interpretive work by intimacy director Gaby Labotka), trying to figure out the bond that has developed among the immigrants that he cannot be a part of, though the sexual attraction between the men is honest. He brings a power of observation that deliberately backfires on the audience’s expectations.

While the play may not be as well knit together as Majok’s other work I’ve seen, you would be a fool to miss this one as a vital topic of debate and discussion. It is intriguing from start to finish. With both matinees and evening showings, it runs Wednesdays to Sundays through Oct. 5 at Next Act Theatre’s nice three-sided space (only 152 seats, so jump early), 255 S. Water St. Be aware there is construction in the area, with signs to guide Water St. traffic.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. His Dom’s Snippets are also at domnoth.substack.com.