BORDER MANIA
Play tackles immig issues even before Don
Hilary Bettis, a Brooklyn playwright, started plotting the script of “72 Miles to Go…” around 2016, when America elected a president who labeled Mexicans as rapists and outlaws.
Bettis, whose Mexicanborn grandfather crossed the border and raised children in Arizona, said her play about a family ripped apart by U.S. immigration policy isn’t about any one president. Or administration. Or political heritage.
Instead, she set out to weave a timeless immigrant tale: a story about everyday people, wrestling with everyday problems, set before President Trump’s victory.
“After the 2016 election, everybody was having a nervous breakdown,” Bettis told the Daily News. “This was a play that was like: I think people actually need to laugh, and they need to fall in love with a family, and they need something that’s gentle and subtle.”
The show, opening Off Broadway on Tuesday at the Laura Pels Theatre, never mentions the 45th commander-in-chief by name.
Bettis said she consciously shifted gears from her first eight fire-breathing plays, shedding angst and substitutsouth ing sugar. In this fable, a family has been split by a mother’s deportation to Nogales, Mexico, some 72 miles of their home in Tucson, Ariz.
A husband and three children tackle their new reality against the backdrop of classic rites of passage: prom, graduation, their Americanborn Chicano dad’s putrid cooking. The narrative is grounded by the patriarch’s monologues from a Unitarian church’s pulpit, a nod to the politically active Universalist Church of Tucson, which Bettis said her real-life father attends.
Life goes on without mom, although she calls in often throughout the show, an unseen but powerful fixture in her children’s lives.
The play first appeared as a workshop production last winter in Houston, an immigrant stronghold, at the historic Alley Theatre.
And even as this year’s production, presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company, rolled through previews, Bettis continued to polish the script, working to maximize the play’s punch.
This edition, planned to close in May, stars Maria Elena Ramirez as Anita, the deported mother, and Triney Sandoval as Billy, the sunny but awkward father. It unfolds over eight years.
Bettis said she wanted to offer a wide-angle view — although a passing late-play reference to “a new president on the horizon” drew knowing chuckles during a preview last month.
“It’s a subject matter that’s so in our zeitgeist right now, and in the news headlines,”
Bettis told The News. “But it’s actually a story that’s been going on for much… longer, and many generations before what is happening in our country now.”
Despite Trump’s hardline rhetoric toward undocumented immigrants, deportation rates have slumped slightly since the administration of President Barack Obama, who was assailed by some immigrants advocates as the “deporter-in-chief.” Conditions in detention centers have nonetheless cratered under Trump, according to advocates.
Stories of immigration remain fundamental to American culture. And Bettis said she wanted to leave politics aside and tell a story melding the joy and sadness found in any family.
Along the way, she peeled past the alarming front pages and depressing statistics that color the Mexican emigration narrative for many here. She hopes crowds at the 424-seat Midtown playhouse see some of their own lives on stage.
“Americans are a little bit obsessed with trauma porn,” Bettis said, “which is something that I really wanted to steer as far away from as possible.”
Her characters aren’t simply victims of harsh laws.
“They’re survivors,” Bettis said. “And they’re resilient.”