Published by Public Books (2022) Available at: https://www.publicbooks.org/sanctuary-cities-and-sanctuary-theater/ Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Theater Benjamin Woodring Haydar [to audience]: I’m sick of telling my story; talk talk talk talk. I already told my story. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to. Don’t make me do this. Sorry, I don’t want to play. … Who are you, the Government, Immigration, a spy of the Minister, who? Catherine Simmonds and asylum seekers and refugees from The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (Melbourne), Journey of Asylum⎯Waiting 1 There is a long-cherished conceit surrounding the theater of sanctuary—plays about asylum and refuge—that the telling of a migrant’s story will yield great dividends. It is partly about changing the minds of the hostile or undecided (the Habermasian fantasy that productive exchanges are possible if only communication is unimpeded). Partly, the rationale is personal: that the opportunity to tell their story on stage will be salutary for the subjects, the migrants themselves. But, in 2022—after Trump and pandemics and exponential increases in data collection— something feels different about doing such theater. The old earnest solicitations for stories do not sit well. Many well-meaning sanctuary plays insist on cuddling up to narrative. But these plays overlook the awkward fact that they can eerily reproduce the systems of interrogation that exclude migrants in the first place. Consider Haydar’s plea in the epigraph above. The “undocumented” are ostensibly those without the required papers for legal life. And yet, they are all too often overdocumented, obsessively documented. The requirement to tell a story—to adjudicatory boards, asylum arbiters, federal judges, police, advocates—can be a never-ending sequence of autobiographical expectation, running to thousands of pages riddled with invasive detail. Asking such a person to account for themselves again on stage edges toward complicity with forces working against the “unapologetic” migrant. Asking a migrant to tell their story on stage implicitly seeks apology—a narrative justification—as rent for occupying stage-space. 2 Whether in reality or in representation, the confessional genre of sanctuary theater places a labor demand—for a coherent, affectively productive story—on an already distressed migrant. This gig becomes only the latest in an endless string of temporary, contingent jobs, each threatening to extract more than it pays. The demands of disclosure, and its attendant repetitions, can traumatically re-enact the past’s disorienting circumstances. The revisiting of one’s story now, when systemic issues continue unresolved, is nightmarish. Martyna Majok, in her play Sanctuary City, which debuted at New York Theatre Workshop last fall and opens at Berkeley Rep July 8, intuits this narrative exhaustion of distressed migrants. In Sanctuary City, there is a healthy distrust of the confessional; at times, a sendup of it. By ingeniously making the telling of stories a major contributor to the brutal circumstances of its protagonists, the play not only exposes the woes of the undocumented, but also chronicles the many iterations of disappointment associated with shallow refuge promises. It casts a self-reflexive glare at its own title and at the theater as an institution, prompting reflection: What are we doing