Just Like Us

Just Like Us is receiving its world premiere by the Denver Center Theatre Company (through November 3 at the Stage Theatre), but I have a hard time imagining it will be produced again (except perhaps by a company of very, very earnest high school students). Though competent as a play and as a production, it fails artistically because of its political orientation, and politically because of a deadly artistic choice.

Just Like Us is an adaptation of Helen Thorpe's book of the same name, and tells the true story of four young women in Denver from high school prom through college graduation. The parents of all four are Mexican immigrants of dubious legal status; two of the girls are legal residents and the other two do not "have papers" (a regular refrain in the show). We're told at the beginning (and in the publicity material) that their different statuses lead to divergent lives, but it's hard to see how that's the case: all four graduate from extremely respectable local universities. The divergence is not in outcome, but in experience, as the two "illegals" go through much more anxiety along their academic journey.

As a resident of metropolitan Denver throughout the period covered by the play, I was naturally struck by references to various events and locations. (One very strange note: three of the young women matriculate at the University of Denver, and the other at Regis University. With that, the fourth drops out entirely until the final scene, without any explanation whatsoever, as though she had moved to Boston. Seriously? The schools are 10 miles apart and maybe a 30 minute drive.) I could barely remember a number of local controversies which loomed large in the protagonists' lives, which very much illustrated the different worlds we respectively inhabit.

Just Like Us is an advocacy piece, arguing that the legal status of all migrant workers in this county should be regularized. It attempts to give opposing views a voice (Tom Tancredo actually appears as a character!). However, all these moments are bracketed, and not so subtly invalidated, by arguments from the show's dominant perspective. As an old-fashioned populist and humanist, I happen to agree with this point of view, at least in broad outline. However, political sympathy cannot excuse emotionally and intellectually manipulative moves in a work of art. Humanism demands that people be presented and treated with integrity as human beings, even if they happen to hold what one deems incorrect policy positions.

  In that regard, the play takes an ensemble approach which does not flesh out many of the characters; with annoying frequency, the actors are called on to make public policy statements (very) thinly disguised as dialogue. The exception is Marisela (in a standout performance by Yunuen Pardo), whose experience dominates and anchors the entire show. Less successful is Helen Thorpe, the journalist who documented this story in newspapers, radio, and ultimately a book. As a stage character, Helen Thorpe is the narrator who explains the Mexican immigrant community and experience to the audience. Mary Bacon does not quite bring Helen to life, but this failing lies more with the script than the actor. She is given very few moments of genuine human interaction, and instead has to deliver long chunks of journalistic exposition directly to the audience.

This brings us to Just Like Us's major artistic failing. It purports to give a voice to young illegal immigrants of color and notable accent, but its dominant voice is white and unaccented. Given that theatre tickets run from $50-60, playwright Karen Zacarías may have felt her audience would need a guide to an alien world of poverty and ranchero nightclubs. To Zacarías's credit, a closing scene has Marisela confront Helen over the latter's judgment of the former's choices and whether she had become properly "American." However, this scene does not exculpate all that comes before, as the audience was never given unmediated access to the lives of Marisela, her family and friends.

In the end, Just Like Us falls into the same soft paternalism of Mississippi Burning and The Help. Instead of inviting white, (often upper-) middle-class audiences to enter a truly different world, it reassures them that, so long as they vote in the correct way and give to appropriate causes, they (unlike less enlightened white people) are true friends to the oppressed and downtrodden. The character of Helen Thorpe may have been challenged, but the affluent audience was comforted.

Not to become overly theological, but this is the ultimate end of a humanism unmoored from its Christian roots. In the Incarnation, our Lord identified with those beneath him, with a people oppressed and downtrodden by sin and death. Liberalism unwilling to acknowledge, let alone submit to and imitate, the Incarnation cannot remain genuinely humanistic for long.