INTERVIEW: New play outlines immigration bureaucratic nightmare
Photo: Wesley Zurick (left) and Soraya Broukhim (right) star in Voyage Theater Company’s The Hope Hypothesis at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture. Photo courtesy of Beowulf Shehan / Provided by Glenna Freedman PR with permission.
Cat Miller’s new play, The Hope Hypothesis, follows a Syrian-born lawyer-to-be named Amena who is preparing to become a United States citizen. Unfortunately she faces a bureaucratic nightmare that may derail her ultimate goal of moving and residing in the U.S.
The show, which begins Oct. 25, will play the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York City. Performances run through Nov. 15 at the downtown venue.
“Two things simultaneously inspired the play,” said Miller, who not only wrote The Hope Hypothesis, but also directs the Voyage Theater Company production. “My friend was born in India, raised in the U.K. and came to the U.S. for graduate school.”
In 2016, this friend attempted to apply for a green card, and they asked her for a birth certificate. She didn’t have one because the document wasn’t issued back in India, and she was told a green card was not going to be possible. And so the bureaucratic nightmare began.
Eventually lawyers and politicians got involved in her case, and her father had to travel to India to visit with the mayor of their old town. They wrote a formal letter that helped her cause, but the delay and headaches still lingered.
“This was so shocking to me,” Miller said of her friend’s ordeal. “She was really scared and afraid she would have to leave the U.S.”
Miller also read a story in The New York Times about the liberation of Raqqa, Syria, and all the formal paperwork issued by ISIS, including birth certificates. Eventually, a fictional story started to develop in her mind, and The Hope Hypothesis was born.
The play, which runs 90 minutes, is a dark comedy that Miller hopes will be quite funny. “For me, the real absurdity is so extreme, you can’t help but laugh at it,” she said. “I needed the humor to help me face it. I feel like laughter can open people up.”
Miller is looking for audience members to experience the show and view the issue of immigration in a different way and with new energy. She doesn’t classify The Hope Hypothesis as activist theater, but rather entertainment that provokes conversation, something in the vein of a Wallace Shawn play (that whole idea that the third act of any production should be out in the bar afterward).
“I think the takeaway from the piece is that all bureaucratic systems come down to the people who enact them,” she said. “If we want to make change, we have to make change with the people, not just the system.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Hope Hypothesis continues through Nov. 15 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in New York City. Click here for more information and tickets.
