72 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
THETHEATRE
DREAMERS AND FRIENDS
Martyna Majok’s “Sanctuary City.”BY VINSONCUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY ANSON CHAN
T
he state hangs over some stories like
a ghost. It changes fates, constrains
motion, and complicates motives, all in-
visibly, without ever having to step into
a scene. In “Sanctuary City”—written by
Martyna Majok, in a New York Theatre
Workshop production, back up at the
Lucille Lortel after being interrupted in
March, 2020, by the COVID lockdown—a
pair of young people are drawn together
and, inevitably, set at odds by an ever-
present, all-encompassing entity: America.
B ( Jasai Chase-Owens) is an undoc-
umented immigrant who was brought to
the United States as a child by his mother,
who now, just as he’s about to finish high
school, wants to return home and leave
him in a hostile country. He’s a so-called
Dreamer at the onset of a long night-
mare. He invokes America—sometimes
calling it, even more abstractly, “here”—
as a fierce and ravening antagonist, al-
ways ready to pluck him out of the shad-
ows and swallow him up. His best friend
is G (Sharlene Cruz), who, thankfully,
becomes naturalized during the course
of the play but is always nursing a bruise
because of violence at home. She sleeps
over at B’s more often than not; they share
his small bed and concoct excuses—a
florid succession of increasingly exotic
illnesses—for her absences from school.
Isolated from their families, in constant
fear of the only country they can claim,really, to know, they are a small but res-
olute team, relatively powerless but some-
how shielding each other from the in-
difference and, worse, menace outside.
The play happens on an empty stage,
and the setting—usually B’s apartment—
is demarcated more by Isabella Byrd’s
minimal but affecting lighting than by
furniture or other props. All the drama
is located in these two lost bodies. At the
outset, they shuffle through short, im-
pressionistic scenes, moving back and
forth through time, across various years
in the early two-thousands, showing how
routine their sleepovers have become—
and, in the same way, how intricately their
griefs and worries grow, swelling beneath
a surface of seeming sameness. G works
at a restaurant—we glide through a mon-
tage and learn what kinds of meals she
brings home for them to share. The con-
stant temporal shifts require deft chore-
ography and sharp transitions, and the
director, Rebecca Frecknall, provides them
amply, spinning B and G into a dance
whose rhythms and gestures the audi-
ence quickly learns to read.
The great danger of a play like “Sanc-
tuary City” is the potential for deaden-
ing topicality. To write about a problem
like immigration is, on some level, to
risk drowning out individuals—real peo-
ple, conditioned by time and stuck in
place—and losing their precious indi-
vidual contingencies in the loud rush of
stronger, impersonal currents.
Majok knows this danger well, and
has skirted it often: she has written several
political plays, including “Cost of Liv-
ing,” about class and disability, for which
she won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. In “Sanc-
tuary City,” she solves the problem inge-
niously, especially in the first act, by setting
her precisely defined characters against
the warm darkness of an empty stage,
and defining their lives through a multi-
tude of subtly varied movements and ges-
tures. To follow them, you have to watch,
and listen, and think. America is in the
background, no doubt about it, and it
threatens to take control of the story at
any moment. But we understand these
two characters because, at Majok’s urging,
we’ve taken their timbres into our minds
and put them in their rightful places: the
unique person over and above the faceless
crowd; the immediate and the real always
more salient than a generalizing idea.
The play’s young immigrants live in fear of the only country they know. When, in painful increments, we see