Ever watch a Hallmark or Lifetime TV movie and think to yourself, “Hmm, this is hitting on some really important issues that are ripe for this kind of intimate analysis; I just wish the script was a little more robust”?
Neither have I. But after seeing 72 Miles to Go…, Hilary Bettis’s well-meaning and generally absorbing new play, focusing on a Latin-American family living in Tucson, Arizona, I suspect I have a sense of what it might be like.
72 Miles opens in 2016, with Billy, a middle-aged Unitarian pastor whose family has lived in the community for generations, delivering a final sermon. Before leaving for parts unknown (at least until the play’s final scene), Billy urges his congregation to savor the “small everyday moments we take for granted,” particularly time with family: “Sitting around the table, eating a meal together and making small talk…why don’t we realize how profound and beautiful and sacred these everyday moments are until they’re gone?”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Billy’s reflections are not simply those of a workaholic. Recalling first meeting his wife, Anita, he describes “the dirt under her fingernails when I handed her a water bottle.” She was, in fact, trying to flee her native Mexico—and not for the last time. As Bettis takes us back to 2008 and then forward, in intervals that can mark the passing of hours or months or more than a year, we see the impact of her plight—that of just one woman, out of the millions who have tried to enter the United States without documentation—on a family, including Christian, the son Anita brought with her from Mexico, and her two children by Billy, Eva and Aaron.
We meet Anita’s kids just weeks after she has been seized by immigration officials, at which point Christian is 23; Aaron and Eva are respectively starting their first and last years of high school, at 14 and 17. Over the ensuing years, Bettis will have them face a laundry list of quandaries and milestones for which children and young adults can benefit from a mother’s guidance, and love—from a high school dance to graduation to career choices, from fielding sibling rivalry to embarking on parenthood. Billy, given an endearing folksiness by Triney Sandoval, tries to comfort them with lame dad jokes—the playwright’s fallback for comic relief—while himself grappling with the love of his life’s absence.
Maria Elena Ramirez lends great warmth in playing Anita—or voicing her, mostly, as 72 Miles takes place principally in the family home, where after being deported she can only be present via telephone. The other actors pace Rachel Hauck’s set, a model of ironic domestic ease, waiting for her call; at one of numerous unabashedly heart-tugging moments—none of them jarringly banal, thanks in part to Jo Bonney’s disciplined direction—Billy and Anita spend an anniversary describing their dinners to each other, and the latter tearfully asks her husband not to discuss their kids.
Christian, as a Mexican native with no papers, lives in constant fear for his own safety; Bobby Moreno conveys the anger and sense of defeat that plague him even as he applies for DACA. (To her great credit, Bettis reminds us that the dangers and indignities facing undocumented immigrants and refugees did not begin with the election of a flagrantly xenophobic president.) As the overtasked, then prematurely jaded Eva, Jacqueline Guillén illustrates how the dreams of even an ambitious valedictorian can be deflated when social injustice intrudes.
But no player in 72 Miles has greater opportunity to reveal the shattering fallout of Anita’s ordeal than Tyler Alvarez, who as Aaron evolves from an insecure, science-obsessed adolescent to a young man who seems increasingly cut off from his emotions; Alvarez makes this transition as disturbing as it is inevitable. Returning from a stint in the Marines, during a particularly fraught juncture, his Aaron is cool and surly, unable to communicate to his closest loved ones how much he needs their attention. It’s only in describing the devastation he saw in Afghanistan, a foreign land, that he finally breaks down a bit.
Then again, the notion of home can be tenuous for anyone who has endured the suffering documented in this play, which at its best succeeds not only in spite of its prosaic qualities but in part because of them.
72 Miles to Go opened March 10, 2020, at the Laura Pels Theatre and runs through May 3. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
