Given that immigration is perhaps the most demonizing issue of our times, the time could not be more right for a humanizing play about this most polarizing subject.
Benjamin Benne’s “Alma” opens Saturday at Denver’s Curious Theatre as a stunned city of Denver suddenly finds itself caught square in the middle of the national immigration crisis — 640 miles from the southern point of entry. Officials estimate more than 4,000 migrants have arrived in Denver over the past month, not only straining city resources but forcing divided residents to reconcile what they believe Denver stands for as a city — and what America stands for as a nation.
Immigration is a very large issue. “Alma” is an intentionally very small story of an undocumented Mexican immigrant and her now 17-year-old American daughter, Angel. They both face important upcoming tests that reveal a deep disparity between their dreams for the future. Alma is helping Angel study vocabulary for the SAT exam that will dictate her college possibilities. Angel is helping her mother learn American History for her citizenship exam. Both feel overwhelming excitement over the possibilities their tests can offer as well as dread about the laws and loopholes that are stacked against them.
'Alma' playwright Benjamin Benne at the Denver Center's 2020 Colorado New Play Summit.
“Alma, having been from Mexico, has these very lofty aspirations for her daughter’s future,” Benne said. “And Angel, having grown up in the United States, has a very different vision of what the American Dream means for her and what is possible — and seemingly impossible — in the U.S.”
Benne wrote his play about his own mother. Or at least that’s what he set out to do when he began writing it.
“My mother was an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who came to the United States in the late ’70s,” said Benne, who was born and raised in Los Angeles County. He tells a story from his youth that, at the outset at least, seems cloaked in the dread of an inevitably awful end.
“I was in elementary school, and one morning, my mother said to me, ‘I can’t drop you off at school today’ — which is something she did every day,” said Benne. “Instead, she said, ‘My friend Maria is going to drop you off because I have something really important I have to do.’ ”
But this story does not end with separation, isolation and deportation, as it has for so many thousands of others. When Benne saw his mother again later that afternoon, she told him, “I’m a United States citizen now.”
As he looks back on that memory today, Benne thought it was both remarkable and a bit arbitrary that his mother went from not being a citizen in the morning to suddenly that afternoon — she was.
“That got me thinking about the history of immigration and immigration law in the United States, and how it’s been constantly shifting,” said Benne, whose mother qualified for amnesty under President Reagan in the 1980s. Today, the issue of immigration is cloaked in the imperiled legal status of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. That is the federal program created by the Obama administration in 2012 that now provides lawful presence, employment authorization, and safety from deportation to 660,000 people who entered the U.S. as children. But recent court challenges have left 1.5 million more unable to apply for the same protections.
The playwright soon realized that his burgeoning idea for a play about his mother, who crossed the border at age 18 in the 1970s, was no longer his mother’s story.
“Because my mother’s pathway to citizenship no longer exists for someone who is currently in the same situation my mother was then,” he said.
Iliana Lucero Barron in Curious Theatre's 'Alma.'
The play takes place in a shared one-bedroom apartment, “and we simply watch 75 minutes of their lives unfold,” said Benne, whose story, he says, is meaningfully set in 2016.
“The play takes place in that limbo period after the election and before Donald Trump’s inauguration,” he said. “The world felt different then. Scarier. I remember this collective moment of holding our breath to see how it all was going to play out. And that’s definitely the state that these two characters are living in. They are in a waiting game where the future looks seemingly bleak. But is it going to be? They are holding on to that thread of hope.”
In 2019, “Alma” was named the winner of the National Latine Playwriting Award — even though, at that time, it existed only on paper.
“Our judges fell in love with the poetically distilled language of “Alma,” said judge and playwright Elaine Romero. “This is a covertly socially relevant play that asks us to look at the impact of the swing of the political pendulum on the lives of everyday people who have come to this country to dream.”
“Alma” was chosen for further development at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company’s 2020 Colorado New Play Summit, where it was introduced as a staged reading just a month before the pandemic shutdown. That’s where it caught the eye of Curious Theatre’s new Artistic Director, Jada Suzanne Dixon.
Benne said he hopes “Alma” will serve as a bridge for audiences who have been watching the ongoing immigration crisis play out for decades.
“In real life, when these stories become headlines, they become really abstracted,” he said. “When that happens, we don’t get to feel the heartbeat and the pulse of what it means for two people who love each other so intensely and really rely on one another, to be separated. That’s what’s at stake in this play. And I think we feel that viscerally when we’re sitting in a room with these two women.”