‘Sanctuary City’ offers thoughtful perspective on the complex lives of ‘Dreamers’

The play “Sanctuary City” is set in or near Newark, New Jersey, in the early 2000s, not long after 9/11. It focuses on two young people — 17 years old when the play starts, 21 when it ends. They don’t have names but are listed as just B for Boy (Grant Kennedy Lewis) and G for Girl (Jocelyn Zamudio).

This choice may well have to do with the fact that they are both immigrants brought to America as kids, but their countries of origin are never made explicit. Names could set expectations for casting or require cultural specifics that playwright Martyna Majok is less interested in than the more universal experiences of what we’d now call “Dreamers,” not quite at home in their home.

Despite being nameless, they are most certainly fully fleshed-out and convincing, the type of characters it’s easy to care about deeply. Lewis and Zamudio, both Chicago-based actors making a significant splash on one of the city’s main stages, capture the characters’ empathy, smarts, ambition and wit, while also exposing their vulnerabilities. They are teenagers after all — their nerves are naturally frayed — but they really do deal with more than their peers. B’s mother, with a long-expired visa, can’t report the abuses she experiences at work for fear of discovery. The same with G’s mother, whose husband or boyfriend abuses both her and G.

It’s that abuse that causes G to show up at B’s home late one night, knocking loudly on his fire escape window, asking for a place to keep warm. It’s a scene that will repeat itself often.

Majok, a University of Chicago grad who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018 for her play “Cost of Living,” writes these early scenes with incredible precision, in staccato-style quick scenes that don’t proceed linearly but that couldn’t be clearer. Under Steph Paul’s direction, the playing in Steppenwolf’s in-the-round space is spare and quickly paced. At the start, Yeaji Kim’s set is nearly empty, the scenes shifting thanks to the evocative and exacting lighting design from Reza Behjat, and the physical, often angular re-positioning of the actors as they repeat many of the same lines, reflecting similar events over time.

Over and over we hear “Thank you” or “I owe you” followed by “It’s OK.” The sanctuary of the title is far more about their relationship than about Newark immigration policy. So when one character’s status changes, meaning almost literally that the person’s “real” American life can now start — college, with a scholarship — the other is left behind. The only solution is marriage, but despite how incredibly close they are, their relationship has never developed in that direction. It’s fair to wonder why.

The first half of “Sanctuary City” is just stunningly beautiful and one of the more emotionally immersive experiences I’ve had at a play in a long time — perhaps since Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves” and Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” by two writers who share with Majok a style that some have called hyper-real even though they have individual and unique voices and approaches.

I’m not as enamored of the second half of the 95-minute “Sanctuary City,” although I deeply admire the artistic choices and craftsmanship. After one character goes away to college in Boston, we jump forward three years or so. B and G are now closer to adulthood and confront the complications that come with thinking further into the future. Sacrifices they were once willing to make for each other start to have tangible possible consequences. Their bond could never stay as impenetrable as it was, and Majok introduces a third character named Henry (Brandon Rivera) to bring that home. 

The style of the play also changes: Furniture appears, and we get one long, realistic scene, more traditional, and more — if you will — American in style. With that come more explicit discussions of the politics that so impact these characters’ lives, and the necessary contrivances that come from conflating significant confrontations into one moment in time. We start to feel the authorial control.

But the writing remains deeply thoughtful, unsentimental, complex, and Zamudio in particular exquisitely portrays the transition from a teenager to a grown-up and the emotional pain of the unsaid she experienced but carefully suppressed. She forces us to ask: What is the line between admirable selflessness and self-denial?

Even with some weaknesses, this play does what the best theater can: provide us with a new perspective that is likely to linger. And that makes me want to see everything Martyna Majok has written and will write into the future.