Theatre Review | 'Sanctuary City' 

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A sanctuary city is the term for a place that offers immigrants basic protections from arrest or deportation on the basis of their citizen status. Rochester is such a city, and several local immigrant stories are featured in the program for "Sanctuary City," a co-production between Geva Theatre Center and Ithaca's Kitchen Theatre Company, playing on Geva's Fielding Stage through April 7.

There are many traps a play about undocumented immigrants can fall into: trauma porn, over-explaining for its audience or flattening characters into political talking points. It’s refreshing to see a play humanize undocumented immigrants without falling into these traps, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok does with “Sanctuary City.” Her characters are complex, contradictory people, and their lives are more than a lesson for the audience to learn.

From the first few minutes, it’s clear this play trusts the audience to lean in and pay attention. The set (designed along with lighting by Indigo Shea) consists of a square tiled platform with a few boxes, a backdrop of boards with jagged tops painted with bricks, a ripped wire fence and a window and fire escape. This background evokes a low-income urban landscape, although most of the scenes take place indoors. The play begins when a teenager known only as G (Cheryse Dyllan) climbs into the bedroom of B (Shawn Denegre-Vaught). G is injured and needs a friend.

The first half of the play consists of abrupt, disjointed moments between G and B. Lights shift and a rumbling roar transition from one beat to the next (sound designed by Germán Martínez). Lines get repeated with new inflection. Scenes are interrupted and returned to as G and B jump around through time, though generally moving forward chronically. Just as the two friends met in an ESL class in third grade where they needed to quickly learn English, the play has its own language the audience must learn as they make sense of the sudden jumps in time and space, the repetitions, the fragments.

With patience and attention, the puzzle pieces come together. It’s the early 2000s, not long after 9/11 in Newark, New Jersey. G’s mother has a tendency to date abusive men, and the teen often seeks refuge with her best friend B. Both are undocumented immigrants from undisclosed countries. B’s mom becomes naturalized while B is still a minor, and the citizenship extends to B. Meanwhile, G’s mother returns to their homeland, leaving G to fend for himself. He dreams of attending college, but without papers he cannot apply for loans or secure a high-paying job. Desperate to help her friend become a naturalized citizen, G offers to marry B.

Halfway through this intermission-less play, there’s a shift and a time jump. The latter part of the play is one continuous scene. A third character, a first-generation law student named Henry (Robert Denzel Edwards), disrupts B and G’s dynamic with new layers of loyalties and complications. If the beginning was tense due to its quick bursts of excitement or frustration, then the second half is tense due to being one long, continuous scene where there is no escape from the mounting tensions among the characters.


Under the direction of Sara Lampert Hoover, this production is tight, thought-provoking and emotionally impactful. Both Dyllan and Denegre-Vaught tackle the challenges of the fragmented scenes with deftness and authenticity. B and G have been forced to grow up too fast, and the actors balance the stress of their situations with the youthfulness of two teens who just want to sneak vodka at prom and dance to the Backstreet Boys. They’re just kids, after all, in their jeans and Converses (costumes designed by Iris Estelle), helping each other fake illnesses to be absent from school.

In the second half, they age by three and a half years. Dyllan, in particular, captures the weight of these years, as B faces the consequences of a promise made in high school.
The play is refreshing for showing the oft-underrated importance of platonic relationships. Instead of sexual chemistry, the actors share a “trauma-bonded-best-friend” platonic chemistry, coming through in the montages where B and G thank each other, over and over, for the small and the large. The beauty of their friendship subtly highlights the bizarre cruelty of immigration law. Their bond runs longer and deeper than any of the sexual relationships mentioned (like G’s mom and her abusive partners), so why do they need to fabricate a sexual relationship to prove their love is real?

The play argues there’s sanctuary in friendship, although it’s ultimately limited. How can any relationship sustain when one person has to risk life as they know it to give their loved one a chance to be recognized by law as a full person? Majok resists easy answers or feel-good solutions. It’s a play written for an uneasy, trepidatious time — a sobering yet impactful examination of love, betrayal and deferred dreams.

"Sanctuary City" runs April 2 — 7 at Geva Theatre Center. Details and tickets here.

Katherine Varga is a freelance contributor to CITY.