Love recognizes no barriers, Maya Angelou told us—a beautiful thought, and a sage one. There is, unfortunately, a caveat: The world can impose its own borders on love, literally and figuratively. Both adverbs apply in Martyna Majok’s hypnotic and heartbreaking new play, Sanctuary City, now resuming a run cut short by COVID in March 2020, while it was still in previews.
A 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for Cost of Living, the Polish-born Majok has given vivid life to a range of disenfranchised characters, among them immigrants. Sanctuary was conceived shortly before and developed after the Department of Homeland Security under President Trump looked into ending DACA, the policy offering undocumented residents who arrived here as children temporary protection from deportation; its principal characters are two such individuals, referred to simply as B and G—a boy and a girl, on the verge of becoming a man and a woman when we meet them. Both are precocious and emotionally deprived—a dangerous combination, potentially.
But B and G are also pragmatic, certainly more so than your average seventeen-year-olds. They have had to be: Both appear to live with single mothers, neither of them legal citizens when the play starts; B’s mom has overstayed her visa and is planning to return to her native country, which isn’t specified, while G’s wants to stay in the States, but not with the latest in a string of abusive men who have made life unbearable for her, and for her daughter.
We initially learn the particulars of B’s and G’s stories through fragments of dialogue, as the play jumps from one conversation to the next, suggesting flashes of memory. Isabella Byrd’s lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design for this New York Theatre Workshop production, both stark and riveting, mark the passing of time. Tom Scutt’s set is dark and, for much of the play, naked; a bare stage represents B’s mother’s apartment in Newark, where G seeks refuge with increasing frequency. “Yer mom’s gonna think we’re sleepin’ together,” G says at one point, playfully but with an edge of hope or longing. “We are sleepin’ together,” he responds, either oblivious to that edge or ambivalent about it.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Whatever love can develop between B and G, romantic or platonic, is complicated by need—not the neediness we typically associate with friends or lovers prone to clinging, for lack of a better word, but need in a more literal, desperate sense. Sanctuary first unfolds in 2001, in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks, as tightened security and concerns about border control make the teenagers even more vulnerable; the play ends in 2006, by which time B and G are in their early twenties, and their devotion to each other has been tested by different obstacles and opportunities and choices—and by the arrival of a third character, named Henry, who faces different hurdles that become entwined with theirs.
It would be difficult to say more without spoiling the canny twists that Majok’s play takes towards the end. If the last, most straightforward scene feels a bit drawn out, the shattering final moments more than pay off. Jasai Chase-Owens, Sharlene Cruz and Austin Smith all bring great empathy and, mercifully, wit to their performances as, respectively, B, G and Henry, and director Rebecca Frecknall likewise culls the frustration, compassion and humor informing B and G’s quest to belong to a country that, though not their place of birth, is essentially the only place they’ve ever known. “I’m from here,” G says at one point, then repeats herself, shifting her emphasis to another pertinent word: “I’m from here. Wherever I end up endin’ up, I’ll have gotten there from this place. Here.”
At a time of profound polarization on this delicate issue, Majok has given us something that transcends politics as only the best and most humane art can.
Sanctuary City opened September 21, 2021, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and runs through October 17. Tickets and information: nytw.org
