Vicky Yvonne, Spike Pulice, and Jonathan Keyes (Photo by Doug Catiller)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
Chance Theatre
Through May 24.
RECOMMENDED
Vicky Yvonne and Spike Pulice (Photo by Doug Catiller)
From its title you couldn’t blame anyone for expecting City to tackle one of the most urgent and contentious narratives in contemporary America: immigration. But while Martyna Majok’s 2018 play is about the struggles of two young people who have spent most of their lives in the United States yet are not legally recognized as Americans, it is not a story about politics, policy or polemics.
It is, instead, a love story — albeit a highly unconventional one — that brushes against the politicized realities of immigration while focusing on the personal toll of identity, belonging and uncertainty.
Set in the early 2000s, the play centers on two characters brought to the United States as children who forge an intense bond as they navigate the instability of undocumented life in America. Spanning several years, it follows their evolving relationship as questions of citizenship, identity and survival steadily complicate their dreams, loyalties and sense of home.
The two main characters, identified only as B and G, have been best friends since meeting in elementary school in Newark, New Jersey. (Their full names and nationalities are never specified, underscoring how undocumented immigrants are so often reduced to categories rather than seen as individuals.)
The play opens with both as high school seniors living amid uncertainty. B (a beautifully complex and tortured Spike Pulice) is a gifted student dealing with crushing poverty and the looming possibility that his unseen mother may return to her native country and leave him behind. Bright but angry and lonely, he seems resigned to a post–high school life spent in the shadows — constantly fearing deportation while working low-wage jobs simply to survive. He masks much of that anxiety through humor and bravado, burying emotion until it erupts.
G (a deeply human and equally conflicted Vicky Yvonne) meanwhile lives with her mother and abusive stepfather but appears more future-oriented. This impression is strengthened early on when we learn that her mother has become naturalized — a status automatically extended to G without her knowledge. When G is accepted into a university, the emotional imbalance between the two friends sharpens. She remains committed to the possibility of stability and permanence, while B struggles to believe that either is truly available to someone like him.
The answer they uncomfortably arrive at is marriage. It is not romantic but transactional — a way to navigate a legal system that has steadily narrowed their options for staying together in the United States.
But the plan carries profound risk. What they are proposing is not a simple workaround but a legally fraught act that could trigger scrutiny, investigation and potential criminal consequences if deemed fraudulent.
The play then jumps ahead three and a half years. The marriage plan still lingers unresolved in the background, but both lives have moved forward in ways that complicate it further. G is nearing college graduation, while B has finally found romantic love, though it is just as complicated since that love, Henry (a solid and nuanced Jonathan Keyes), is a man and the play is set years before Obergefell v. Hodges.
Though the narrative follows a clear chronological arc, it does not unfold in strictly linear fashion. Particularly in the first half, scenes loop and overlap, dialogue circles back on itself and characters interrupt their own thoughts. The effect is the sense of language that never fully lands, as meaning is constantly deferred or revised in real time.
Majok’s fragmented, almost musical vernacular style turns this repetition into structure. It works on two levels. First, it reflects how people under sustained pressure actually speak — especially friends who have grown up in instability, where direct statements can feel too risky or final.
Second, it mirrors the condition they inhabit: limbo. Immigration status, economic precarity and emotional uncertainty create a life where nothing fully resolves and thought itself becomes recursive. What matters is often not what is said, but what is stalled, returned to or avoided. The result is a language of hesitation that exposes the gap between identity and expression and a world in which the law will not fully allow these characters to become fully actualized.
The second half is more conventional in form and dialogue and in doing so loses some of the earlier charm and humor (these are, after all, teenagers and it is great fun watching a couple in platonic love navigate high school dances and the pressures of trying to seem “normal”). But it remains grounded in the same emotional stakes as the tone shifts and the characters move into young adulthood and the consequences of earlier choices come into sharper focus.
Director Oanh Nguyen navigates the play’s shift from fractured, kinetic storytelling to a more conventional dramatic structure with style, clarity and control. Movements are expertly timed to lighting and musical cues and the play, while clocking in at just under two hours without an intermission, never feels long.
This is a deeply intimate and well-told story, one that makes it difficult not to root for its characters. But that allegiance is tested as the characters’ allegiances are tested, and as circumstances and choices pull them in different directions. In a play marked by multiple heartbreaks, the most painful ones may not be onstage, but in the audience.
Chance Theater @ Bette Aitken theater arts Center, 5522 E La Palma Ave, Anaheim. Opens Fri., May 8; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm; thru May 31. https://chancetheater.com/sanctuary/ Runtime: approximately one hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.
