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THE NEWYORKER, OCTOBER 11, 2021 73
political particulars prying the friends
apart—G has earned a scholarship to a
school in Massachusetts; B, in spite of
his good grades and hard work, can’t go
to college because of his status—we ex-
perience it as personally excruciating. This
injustice is falling on the back of a guy
whose life we, improbably, know—not
only in biographical detail but through
his style and bearing, accumulated and
elaborated upon right in front of us, under
the lights.
The friends—in love, in a way, but
not conventionally romantic, for rea-
sons that creep up over time—devise
a plan that conscripts a different kind
of flawed institutional reality: marriage.
Vexed by Homeland Security, their un-
certain eyes turn to the Marriage Bu-
reau. They’re being tugged, like all of
us, between matters of the heart and
the bureaucratic maze.
T
he last time I saw Sharlene Cruz on
an Off Broadway stage, it was in
“Mac Beth,” Erica Schmidt’s smart ad-
aptation of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” at
Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe The-
atre, which overlaid that familiar story
with echoing events from the recent news.
In it, Cruz—aided by a lively company,
one of my favorite ensembles in recent
memory—flitted artfully between devil-
ishly iconic archetype (she played one of
the witches) and present-day uniformed
schoolgirl. She moved with classical gran-
deur at one moment, and, at the next,
splashed through a fresh puddle, all ad-
olescent oblivion.
Watching Cruz work in “Sanctuary
City” clarifies why she was so well suited
to that fluid task. Her voice first appears
as a casual, downbeat alto, but it stretches
itself to express a range of emotions, and
to toe the line between the pointedly in-
formal style of the mid-two-thousands
and the gravity of timeless struggles. At
one point, G insists, trying and failing to
seem calm, that she has roots in the apart-
ment from which she and her mother
are suddenly fleeing, no matter how many
abuses she’s suffered or seen. “I’m from
here,” she says. “Wherever I end up endin
up, I’ll have gotten there from this place.”
In the same way, she’s from America,
whether it wants her or not. Majok’s script
includes the intriguing note that her char-
acters all have “American mouths”—that
they are products of this place, as local
as it gets, evidenced, primarily, by their
lingo. Cruz’s ear, eager for contemporary
sounds, helps get that sonic idea across.
In G’s short speech about “here,” the au-
dience feels her ambivalent edge, how
she’s walking on a tightrope between
childhood and a premature awareness of
adult trouble, all springing from the
ground beneath her feet.
Cruz’s physicality is similarly multi-
valent. She takes prototypical millennial
slouchiness and makes it harmonize with
Frecknall’s pinpoint choreography. She
makes G’s face a guarded puzzle, and
then, at moments of rare ease or high
emotion, lets it open, revealing entire hid-
den, unspoken worlds. This makes her
pairing with Chase-Owens work espe-
cially well. Chase-Owens has an intelli-
gent, big-hearted, receptive presence, and
his verbal and gestural volleys with Cruz
cause even the most seemingly banal and
repetitive dialogue to glow with meaning:B: You look so good.
G: You look so good.
B: No you look so // good.
G: Shut the fuck up.
B: You do. You look so good.
G: I’ll punch you in the face.
B: I’d punch you in the face you’d still l o o k
good.That’s intimacy—aggression in the guise
of compliments. You can watch an ex-
change like this and feel the whole trou-
bled history of B and G’s relationship
flicker through their words. Toward the
end of the play, the action slows down,
and their early camaraderie comes to a
crux—with the help of another charac-
ter, played by Julian Elijah Martinez.
The kinetic excitement of the begin-
ning is gone, and the plot loses some of
its sense of easy inevitability. But the
tight skin around the play holds because
of Majok’s insistence on the primacy of
friendship—complete with exacting spe-
cifics—and Cruz’s galvanizing ability to
enact it in all its complexity.
“Sanctuary City” takes place in the
years immediately following the terrorist
attacks on 9/11—with just a few artful
strokes, it makes clear the link between
the war on terror and an increasingly
hellish time for immigrants. “Septem-
ber” is one of those looming abstrac-
tions, like “America.” Majok’s achieve-
ment is to make this recent history feel
ancient. What we really want to know
is what the future holds for love. WHAT’S THE
BIG IDEA?
Small space has big rewards.ADVERTISEMENT
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JILLIAN GENET
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