Time is so strange. 

The year 2015 seems like a lifetime ago, and it also feels like yesterday. That was the year marriage equality became law of the land after the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in all 50 states. I remember that moment so vividly, and yet the time before it seems so distantly far away. 

In “Sanctuary City,” a play by Martyna Majok, the characters can’t even imagine what national marriage equality might look like. It’s set in a post-9/11 landscape. Toward the end of the play, the characters mention that gay couples can now marry in Massachusetts after that state’s Supreme Court decision in 2004. But they can’t even conceive of a time when marriage would be legal in all 50 states. 

The characters also don’t talk about the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a never-passed law that would have granted temporary residency to undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as minors. And the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which has protected 500,000 undocumented people from getting deported and provided them legal work authorization since Barack Obama first initiated the program by executive order in 2012, hadn’t happened yet. 

I was feeling upset when I went to go see Frank Theatre’s production of the play. There’s just been a lot in the news that has been stressful, and the particular news article I read before heading to Open Eye Theater happened to be about the University of Minnesota saying that it will comply with court-backed ICE immigration orders. This, despite the U’s statement on its website saying, “we encourage and welcome all students to apply, regardless of immigration status.” (In response, University students, faculty, staff, and community members have started a petition). 

Because “Sanctuary City” is a period piece, I began to remember what it was like back in the aughts, before Obama became president, before DACA, before the Affordable Care Act, and before marriage equality. And yet while the play’s historical context is a key part of its framework, its resonance to our current political climate felt exceedingly present.

Majok’s play was set to have its world premiere off-Broadway in 2020, but was cancelled during previews because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It eventually opened at the Lucelle Lortel Theatre in 2021, and more recently had a run at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 2023. Now, Frank Theatre’s production at Open Eye takes place as the Trump administration unleashes executive orders targeting undocumented immigrants. 

I don’t know how to really talk about this play without letting one or two spoilers slip through, so please proceed reading with caution if that will irritate you. 

At the heart of the story are two people whose parents immigrated to the United States when they were young. With a bit of luck, one of them becomes a citizen before they turn 18 after their parent’s successful naturalization process. The other does not. If fate had taken a different turn, they might have fallen in love. Maybe they could have gotten married, which would have provided perhaps an easier pathway to citizenship for the friend who was undocumented. 

As I watched the first half of the story, I thought that was what was going to happen. The two characters plan a marriage of convenience, and for a moment I thought the narrative might turn into a plot like the 1990 Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell movie “Green Card,” which I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve seen many times. As you may recall, in the movie, the two leads have a fake marriage in order to aid Gérard Depardieu’s immigration process, only to actually fall in love with each other. “Sanctuary City” is not that story though.

Majok constructs the play in two acts that are starkly different from each other in tone and structure. The first half of the play features two actors – Stephanie Anne Bertumen as G, and Clay Man Soo as B. The scenes are very short and go back and forth in time. We see very little furniture, and the actors employ miming to indicate the objects they interact with and the world that surrounds them. 

The lighting design, by Tony Stoeri, is stark, and Dan Dukich’s moody sound design creates a sense of urgency in Brechtian episodic mini-scenes. 

The scenes mostly take place in the apartment where B lives at first with his mother and then alone. Escaping the chaos of her mother’s abusive relationships, G becomes a frequent visitor, often entering B’s room through the fire escape. The audience watches a growing intimacy between the two friends, though something (it’s not revealed what, at first) prevents them from becoming romantic. 

In contrast to the minimalism of the first act, the play’s second act looks a lot more like realism. It takes place in the same apartment as the first act, but now the audience can see the furniture, and the whole set is lit. Instead of short scenes that employ repetition and time experimentation, Majok develops one longer scene with an Aristotelian arc and climax. The audience also gets introduced to a third character – a gay law student named Henry, played by Keivin Yang, who is B’s boyfriend. 

I’m not exactly sure why Majok divides the play into such structurally divergent halves. The only thing I can think of is that the first act’s episodic, experimental structure adds to a feeling of confusion the characters both feel. The uncertainty of their futures and of their relationships with each other is mirrored in a script that is at times difficult to follow. In contrast, everything is made clear and apparent in the second act, and the three people have nothing to do but hash things out between the three of them.

Honestly, I strongly disliked all three of the characters by the end of the play. While I could understand each of their grievances – with the world and with each other – I wasn’t able to root for any of them because of their rotating list of character flaws – whether that be bigotry and manipulation, dishonesty and insecurity, or bullying, depending on the character.

That’s not to say the actors weren’t good in the roles. I found each of them very believable, both before and after the structural break halfway through. 

At some point as I was watching the second act unfold, getting angrier and angrier at the three characters, I realized these people are all behaving badly because their situation is so impossible and ugly. In the world in which these characters lived, there were no good options for undocumented people who were brought to this country as children. There also weren’t good options for LGBTQ people who loved each other and wanted to marry. 

The one thing I did miss in their development was any cultural references or language. Majok, who immigrated to the U.S. from Poland herself, intentionally doesn’t specify in the script what country the characters are from, and doesn’t include any signifiers about their ethnicity. I understand why she might do this, but I also wondered about what we didn’t understand about  the characters with these layers unexplored.

In any case, the play, and Knox’s direction of it, did get me riled up enough to want to talk about the play afterwards, and has had me thinking about it since. As it has in the past, Frank Theatre has chosen a play that engages with a pressing issue at large, and asks its audience to grapple with ideas through the art of theater.

“Sanctuary City” runs Thursday, Feb. 6 (sold out), Friday, Feb. 7 and Saturday, Feb. 8 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 9 at 2 p.m., through Feb. 23 at Open Eye Theater, 506 E. 24th St., #3732, Minneapolis, $30. More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].

The post Exploring the life of the undocumented and gay in ‘Sanctuary City’ appeared first on MinnPost.

This post was shared from MinnPost.