Photo by A.J. Magoon
King Hang, Ashley Oveido
King Hang, Ashley Oveido in rehearsal for Next Act Theatre's 'Sanctuary City'
Sanctuary City is an even more provocative title for a play now than it was when it debuted in 2021. It’s an immigrants’ story, but playwright Martyna Majok isn’t grappling with policy minutia. Sanctuary City was performed last year by Marquette University Theatre and will receive its Wisconsin professional premiere this month at Next Act Theatre. Jake Penner is the director.
“It’s a balance of the poetic with the obscene, the political with the deeply personal,” Penner says. Sanctuary City will be his first time helming a Milwaukee production, but avid local theatergoers might already know him for his work with American Players Theatre and Madison’s Forward Theater Company. “I fell in love with Sanctuary City the first time I read it,” he says. “It’s an extraordinary piece of dramatic literature,” a play with surprising twists.
The play has two “halves—not acts,” Penner insists. The first half is set shortly after 9/11 and the second a few years later, but the specific ethnicity of the play’s three characters is not at issue. Majok was born in Poland and immigrated as a child with her parents to Newark, a sanctuary city. In 2018 she received a Pulitzer Prize for a drama on relations between the abled and the disabled, Cost of Living. “She grew up around immigrant communities and is interested in people living on the fringe,” Penner says. The New York Times compared Majok’s Newark to the Pittsburgh of August Wilson.
Penner intends to strictly adhere to Majok’s stage directions. “For the first half, she asks you to perform on a bare stage with no miming or gestures. Just two small, specific props.” It’s all voice and text. “It’s conceptually brilliant,” he adds. The first half is told in snapshots of memory, and “as the detritus fades, you’re left with two people and two artifacts with deep emotional connection.”
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Those two people are a couple who drift into intimacy: G, a Latina (Ashley Oviedo) and B, a Hmong (King Hang). The staging in the second half is more conventional, described by Penner as “a solidly tactile place with accents of Hmong culture, a specter of a culture of origin. And then,” he adds, “a two-person drama becomes a three-person drama” with the tension-triggering arrival of Henry (Joe Lino).
“They are quintessentially American without much memory of their countries of origin,” Penner says of the characters. And yet, “the American immigration system is always just on the edge of the stage at risk of invading their space. At heart, Sanctuary City is a relationship story about how their lives are encroached upon by the political system.”
However, Sanctuary City is not just about politics. The characters “take sanctuary in each other,” Penner says.
Sanctuary City will be performed Sept. 10-Oct. 5 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. For tickets and more information, visit nextact.org.
