First off, parking stories continues. We did get reasonable parking through the theater app, but it was across the width of Seattle Center, which was a long walk for folk of our age, even taking it in multiple stages. On the parking lot elevator, we encountered another grey-haired couple in the elevator who were also attending the same play.
SHE: What do you know about the play?
ME: I don't know much. I tend to go into these things blind.
SHE (Poking her husband): HE'S the same way!
And yeah, we have season tickets, so we're going, even though the matinee has been moved up to noon and we had Daylight savings time to boot.
Anyway, Sanctuary City. It was very, very good.
The play divides into two neat, well-produced halves. The Boy, simply identified as B (Junior Nyong'o) and the Girl, G (Emilie Maureen Hanson) are both Millennials in Jersey, underage and illegal in a post-eleven America that does not want them. Their situations are not exact, but they team up as friends, G crashing at B's place to avoid a violent stepfather. We follow them through their high-school years in a scattershot of short, short vignettes, the actors dipping in and out of repeated sequences to set up the pattern of their life from school through graduation. On a bare stage, the short vignettes, slammed into each other over the course of years, like the kids are workshopping their adult lives and what they're going to do. Spoiler - one gets legal, and promises to marry the other, regardless of the personal risk.
And it works surprisingly well. Director Chiang tried this sort of thing in Constellations, which did not work, but here, under the fire and talent of the leads, it powers through effortlessly grabs the audience and does not let go.
And probably if that was where it ended, it would have rewarding but not enough to justify a full production. But, then, everything changes, the black backdrops rotate (a deft use of the Rep's often-overplayed stagecraft), to transform into an apartment over the New Year's break, three years after the promise. Things have changed, and the kids have moved from sharp, all-elbows and worry to long-term angst and stress. Their lives have changed. G visits and discovers B living his lover (a sharp Josh Kenji). Relationships are tested, and the characters have to face a no-win situation, that, regardless of the choice, someone will have to sacrifice their future.
And it is sad and beautiful and honest. Hanson and Nyong'o grow up (and apart) before our eyes. And while delving into the depths of the political situation of the age (post WTC, pre-cell phones), it is political but never weighed down by the overwhelming politics of the era instead concentrating on the characters' own situations. They take the politics and make it personal, and in doing so conquer their lives.
Yeah, I liked it. Glad I went in blind, because it left me wondering how it would all turn out, and it was sad and funny and damned good writing with damned good actors. More of this, please.
More later,
