Notes from the Director:
It is a great honour and privilege to have been entrusted with this play and this production. When I first encountered Sanctuary City, I was struck by how it holds contradiction. It is at once intimate and expansive, grounded and abstract, deeply personal and politically urgent. It refuses to resolve neatly, and that refusal feels essential.
This play centers young people negotiating systems that were not built for them. Their lives are shaped by policies, borders, and timelines that operate beyond their control, yet the play does not reduce them to those systems. Instead, it asks us to witness their agency, their humor, their contradictions, and their care for one another.
In rehearsal, we have been particularly interested in how form reflects experience. The first part of the play asks us to build a world without objects, relying on the actors’ bodies, voices, and shared imagination. It is a space of memory, possibility, and fragmentation. The second part appears more grounded, but it carries the residue of what came before. Nothing is fully stable. Nothing is fully resolved.
My work as a director often explores how language lives in the body. Here, that question has been central. How do we speak when speaking carries risk? How do we listen when listening might change everything? What does it mean to stay, or to go?
This production has been shaped by a remarkable group of artists who have approached this play with courage, precision, and deep care. I am grateful for their trust and collaboration.
Thank you for witnessing this story with us.
— Sarah Rose
