Sanctuary City

A reading at BCT

Or: Mutual Need

It’s Girl meets Boy. Girl and Boy are immigrants, Girl and Boy give shelter to each other in troubled times. Girl and Boy grow a strong mutual affection, that will be tested by years and promises. But this is not the story you think it is.

Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City time spools and unspools. Running six years in 90’s minutes, it starts from the aftermath of September eleventh and flips back and forward like the pages of a book. The relationship between our unnamed heroes (Amelia Karadza and Jovani Zambrano) waxes and wanes from tenderly adult to enduringly childish, with roots of both spreading out to the past and future as we revisit them. Karadza brings a bristly distrust, cut with bright good humor like ground glass, as her character twines around Zambrano’s well articulated sense of frozen helplessness, curling and collapsing into the hollowness at his center, his dreams perpetually deferred.

The script, and the actors, play well but are kicked into high gear in the plays second act when Henry (Ben Clegg) an outsider to the pair’s long studied story enters. Just as Henry ground’s Majok’s script, Clegg’s gentle intensity brings the performances into sharper focus. Between the three of them, the story of hope and struggle, or reliance and love, vibrates faster and faster until it burns. It is not the story you expect, but in the way of all wonderful scripts, it balances what is in retrospect inevitable, while teasing the possible futures of might be.