On his first date with Anita, Billy cooked tuna and noodles — not the suavest choice of entree, especially since he loaded it with mayonnaise.
“It was terrible,” she reminisces on their anniversary, half a lifetime later. “The worst meal I ever had.”
As she speaks, he recreates that dinner in their kitchen in Tucson, Ariz., where a vase of red roses adorns the table, lit by a single candle. But Billy is alone, Anita keeping him company by phone. Trapped on the other side of the U.S. border with Mexico, she is unable to get home to him and their children.
It has been this way for many months, and if the government ever lets Anita back in, it won’t be for years. So they celebrate their marriage long distance, the easy intimacy of their conversation full of comfort and yearning. When she cajoles Billy into dancing with her, he dances with his phone.
They are such ordinary people with such unremarkable dreams. And if Hilary Bettis’s “72 Miles to Go…” is a quiet, conventional drama with a penchant for endearingly cornball humor, that suits the story of a family that wants more than anything to blend in, to live regular American lives. The play’s poignancy lies in how mercilessly difficult that is, and how precarious for all of them.
Billy and Anita first met in the desert — he an Arizonan out with his church group, bringing water to migrants, she a Mexican fleeing danger with her little boy, Christian, who will grow up not knowing Spanish and having no idea that he isn’t an American citizen like Eva and Aaron, the children Billy and Anita have together.
Directed by Jo Bonney at Roundabout Theater Company’s Laura Pels Theater, “72 Miles” is not about the recent crisis at the border, or not directly anyway. Unfolding from 2008 to the spring of 2016, it encompasses a time of cautious optimism for young people like Christian, who called this country home and hoped the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy would allow them to stay.
In the character breakdown in the script, Bettis (“Alligator”) describes each family member other than Anita as either Chicana or Chicano — an American of Mexican descent. This play is about various ways of being American, with or without the documentation to prove it.
It is also about carrying a low-level fear inside you all the time, a worry that the authorities are coming for you, or your brother, or your mother. And about the pain of having to live without the physical presence of someone you need, someone who is 72 miles, one phone call and a world away.
So there is teenage Eva (Jacqueline Guillén), bursting into tears on a prom night gone wrong, wanting so badly the solace of her mother (Maria Elena Ramirez), but having only her sweetly bumbling father (a terrifically winning Triney Sandoval) to drive her home.
There is Eva’s little brother, Aaron (Tyler Alvarez), morphing from a tender, kindhearted boy into a man with a military-macho carapace. And there is her big brother, Christian (Bobby Moreno), stalked by terror that his life will disintegrate — that his American wife and the American family they made will have to do without him.
Moreno is a fine actor, but Christian, when we first meet him, is just 23. Moreno, who is married to Bettis, looks at least a decade older — a distraction that makes you wonder how old Christian was when he got here and how he could have been pre-verbal then. It also throws off the intended dynamic between him and his siblings, particularly in a scene that dips into sentiment, calling back to the blanket forts and hot strawberry milk of their shared childhood.
That moment, like a too-prophetic line that Billy speaks in early 2016 (“With a new president on the horizon, who knows what the laws will look like”), is an indulgence in a play that is otherwise thoughtful and restrained. Its power is in its simplicity, and in the vividly average Americanness of its characters.
To its credit, “72 Miles” doesn’t go where you might think it will, but it does eventually bring us to Anita, with her family, in the flesh. And if that reunion is staged a little awkwardly, we are nonetheless awfully glad to see her. Over the phone, we’ve grown to know her voice so well.
72 Miles To Go…
Through May 3 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
