Sanctuary City
Theaterworks
Hartford
April 18, 2024
An expectation of consistency is what I walked in with to Sanctuary City, which I went to see at Theaterworks last night. Unfortunately, the play felt unbalanced. Its themes never meshed with the human drama of the characters, and the staging often confused me more than it illuminated the play’s ideas. Something just felt off about the production, and that nagging feeling ultimately culminated in a climax that didn’t address what the play is ostensibly about.
That’s the spoiler-free version. From here on out I’m going to discuss the plot in specific detail to get at what made the production feel inconsistent.
The story begins in the early 2000s, in New York after the destruction of the World Trade Center. The play itself begins with the morning of September 11 being projected onto large screens at the back of the stage, showing the well-known footage of a conversation on the street before the cameraman zooms in on the first airplane crashing into the World Trade Center. The footage stops suddenly before the plane hits the tower, but it’s a jarring introduction to a play about undocumented immigrants.
The play centers around G (played by Susan Gutierrez), an undocumented teenaged girl and B (Grant Kennedy Lewis), an undocumented teenaged boy. The opening scene shows G climbing the fire escape to B’s room; in this case the screens are put to good effect when images of fire escapes and rooftops are projected onto them.
Suddenly, mid conversation, the lighting changes from a sharp blue to a warm orange, with a similar shift in G and B’s conversation. The transition is jarring like the opening, with no real context to frame the jumps between colors. I figured that it must be a technique to differentiate between the past and the present, but as the transitions continued and I listened to the conversation, I became unsure of what the shifts represented. It seemed that both the orange and the blue conversations were happening in the same time frame, so the constant shifting became disorienting.
The first half of the play was basically separated into small vignettes that showed clips of conversations between G and B at various points in their lives. Through these snippets we learn the circumstances of the main characters’ lives. G lives at home with her mother and her mother’s abusive husband, while B lives at home with his mother. Eventually, G’s mother becomes a citizen, allowing G to step out of the shadows and enroll in college. B also dreams of going to college, but his life goes in the opposite direction. His mother, who kept them both there well past the expiration of their visas, returns home, leaving B to fend for himself. After a few years, B hatches a plan to get his citizenship. G agrees to marry him, even though she’s been away in Boston for years.
G backs out of the marriage, but a year later she returns to New York to fulfill her promise. As the two practice their responses to investigators who will question the validity of their relationship, G’s true feelings for B become apparent, with her going so far as to suggest that they have sex in order to be sure about aspects of their physical relationship.
This is where Henry, B’s boyfriend, comes in, literally. He comes into the apartment B & G are in, and immediately the sparks fly between him and G over who loves B more and who is more trustworthy. Henry (Mishka Yarovoy) is a breath of fresh air for the play, bringing humor and energy to the production. His conflict with G instantly injects the tension into the play that was lacking earlier. Gutierrez responds wonderfully to playing the jealous friend, and stands out when given material other than speechifying about her immigration status. Unfortunately, Lewis isn’t given much to do except stand around, hapless while G and Henry decide his future. When G gives him an ultimatum to choose between the marriage to her and his relationship with Henry, B says, “Why do I have to choose?” It’s a baffling statement from a character that has known what he’s wanted the entire play.
Ultimately, he chooses to stay with Henry because of G’s ultimatum. But in a shocking twist, when B asks Henry to consider moving to his home country to escape the constant concerns regarding citizenship, Henry not only declines, but then walks out of the relationship after declaring that it could never work. The play ends with B standing alone in his apartment, reciting the questions about his fake marriage to himself.
When I say that the play feels unbalanced, this is what I mean. I don’t mind sad endings to stories, as long as the weight of the story justifies the outcome. Sanctuary City sets itself up as a story about the challenges and losses people face as undocumented immigrants in the early 2000s. The story isn’t set up for the crushing blow of watching both of the people B loves walk out of his life. When people say, “it hit like a ton of bricks,” this is what they’re talking about. The ending is heavy; too heavy for the play that preceded it, and especially for the turbulent but still upbeat and reaffirming battle between G and Henry. Look how much they both love him, so much that they’re at each other’s throats about who gets to be with him. They love him so much that…they both decide to walk out of his life and leave him to face the challenges of his undocumented status alone? There’s a play where that outcome makes sense, but this isn’t the one.
The incongruence is also visual. The orange light/blue light shift which characterized the first part of the play is completely gone, as is the short vignette style of storytelling that characterized the rest of the play. We spend the last hour of the play in one scene with B, G and Henry. It’s riveting and well acted, but feels like it’s from a different play.
It was clear from the opening seconds of Sanctuary City that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending for some of the characters. But the ending we got doesn’t feel good with the rest of the play. Its bleakness is still incongruent in a play that has some rather unhappy moments. That, along with the visual inconsistencies, result in a production that doesn’t push either of its premises — either the cost of citizenship or the price of love — as far as they should go.
NEXT
Sanctuary City continues through April 25.
Jamil goes to UConn Health Center to check out some art.
