The first image of the play is a girl on a fire escape. She’s cold and anxious to get inside; the boy helps her climb through his window. Somewhere in our collective imagination, West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet have turned the fire escape into a shorthand for star-crossed romance. Even long after the play has changed (and changed again), our minds hang onto that first moment to say “here is young love.â€
Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City contains other romances, other yearnings. It also breaks its own heart, pivoting in the middle from experimental high-wire act to tendentious issue drama. There are moments in the last section of Sanctuary City that seem to belong to another writer entirely, and characters welch on promises the playwright made on their behalf. Why does Majok do it? I’m feeling my way here (I’m still bruised), but I think it might be because theater’s vicarious heartache isn’t enough for her. To tell the story she wants to tell, she’s willing to let us fall out of love with the play itself.
The stage seems to be in its raw state: Tom Scutt’s set — black mesh on the walls, a large empty platform, a ghost light pushed to one side — has the messy darkness of a backstage in disarray. A reedlike young man, Jasai Chase-Owens, stands looking out and up, and the little Lucille Lortel Theater seems to tower above him. The young woman, played by Sharlene Cruz, appears, asking to be let in. It’s Newark in 2006, but it’s also abstract: The script simply lists them as B and G (Boy and Girl); there are no props. Between bursts of dialogue a bank of lights flares, blinding the audience, so the actors seem to change position almost magically. Occasionally we see an exchange twice or out of order, or a sequence hopscotches through time. Their speech is fast and overlapping, Mamet-ian interruptaspeak delivered at first without inflection, then with verve and humor. A year might get covered this way in moments, a flip-book of snapshots.
B What are you gonna say at school? About yer face —
G I’m not goin.
B Yeah. Yeah prob’ly you should maybe don’t.
* * *
* * *
B What are you gonna say at school? About yer eye —
G I’m not goin.
B Yeah.
* * *
* * *
B What are you gonna say at school? About —
G I’m not goin.
B Yeah. Yeah prob’ly you should maybe don’t.
In just nine lines, Majok shows us three separate episodes at breathtaking speed, demonstrating both the length of B and G’s friendship and the repeated domestic violence that keeps G running to B’s house for shelter. When they sleep just barely separated in B’s twin bed, the director, Rebecca Frecknall, has them simply stand in dim light, as though we are seeing the pair from above; the electricity the two generate by not touching each other could light a city street. Through this long first section of the play, Chase-Owens looks as stunned as a roadside deer; Cruz bristles and swaggers, then crouches at her friend’s feet like she’s warming herself at a fire. The two high-school students negotiate their multiple crises — and platonic prom — with old-beyond-their-years pragmatism, so when G’s citizenship status comes through and B is still undocumented, G (literally) proposes her help. The pair start to practice for their immigration interview. Where did we meet? Do our parents approve? When did the relationship first turn romantic? It’s all for a fake history, but both seem to blush over the answers. And then G goes off to college.
There is, of course, another point on their what-kind-of-love triangle. The unrequited American promise inserts itself into any romantic story Majok writes. In Ironbound and Queens, she dealt with immigrants alternately bearing up and collapsing under the State’s heavy boot. The turbulent edge of our economy contains all kinds of places for abuse — physical, financial, psychological — and her scrappy, resourceful characters suffered them all. She won the Pulitzer Prize for the two-heartbreak play Cost of Living, which shows the corrupting influence of a country that refuses to assume a duty of care to its disabled people. How can desire, affection, and respect flourish in a place so determined to stop all flourishing?
So it should come as no surprise that Majok finds a way to rattle her central couple. She does it by shifting the story forward more than three years, then changes nearly every possible term of engagement the characters have with the text. The experimental strategies of the first section (the light-bulb flashes, the time dilation) that paradoxically made G and B’s relationship so believable all disappear, and the last section of the play becomes a long, naturalistically depicted conversation. It’s a formal shock, but there are other shocks to follow. Some of these made the audience gasp — when does that happen? — so it feels spoiler-y to talk too much about the drama’s second half. The play starts to depend on surprise for its effects, so if you’re going to actually see the play, you should skip the next paragraph.
Everything we thought we knew was wrong. G and B have not been honest with each other; B has a lover, Henry (Austin Smith), whose presence upends their fragile plan. When he enters, Majok’s vivid, weight-sharing waltz of the duologue turns into a clumsy three-way fight, and everyone’s grace switches off. Cruz turns pugnacious and awkward; Chase-Owens loses his mystery and merely drifts, confused, between the two people who disagree about how to help and love him. The overwhelming pressure for Smith and Chase-Owens to strike sexual sparks casts a damper over their suddenly sluggish performances, and Majok’s dialogic fire goes out at the same time. Our minds cast back to the first part of the play, recasting the interactions, attempting to re-see a relationship we thought we understood. It’s a daring move, but it needs virtuosity to pull off. Unfortunately, though, the more realistic Majok’s style becomes, the more artificial the play is: In order to keep tension at a melodramatic pitch, her three characters say and do things to one another that sound tinny and false.
The effort to reconcile the two acts feels, even after you’ve been doing it for several days, like trying to cut cardboard with child’s scissors. Can I even trust my displeasure? I’m not sure Majok wants us to be able to fit the halves together, but it’s difficult to have such different feelings about a show: first bewitched admiration, then bewildered dismay. I keep reminding myself, though: If a writer like Majok blows up a play, you can believe she set the charges on purpose. I think a clue to the way Sanctuary City operates is in the title. Its irony is meant to catch you up short. The laws that govern B’s documentation status are arbitrary and cruel, distributing largesse to G (and snatching her away into a life of documented privilege), while keeping B in terror and poverty in Newark. This, this is what we call a sanctuary? In such a foul-speaking world, every effort to help him turns into a mechanism of coercion and betrayal. In such a Kafkaesque refuge, no hand, let alone a play, can reach him. The glittering first half isn’t the “truth,†but neither is the clay-footed second half. Perhaps the real story is hiding inside the fissure itself — the act break between them, when darkness swallows B up and he has nowhere to go.
Sanctuary City is at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through October 10.