EXCLUSIVE from TheatricalWrites!
Pulitzer Prize winner, Lucille Lortel award-winner, recent recipient of the 2023 Obie Award for Playwriting, and now Tony Award nominated: Martyna Majok’s legacy has only just begun.
Her work is urgent, exploring pressing stories of the American experience that demand to be told.
Although she is deep in the throes of writing the musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby (with music by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett), Martyna found some time to spend with TRW's Katie Stottlemire, discussing her play SANCTUARY CITY and revealing some of her writing process.
KATIE STOTTLEMIRE: SANCTUARY CITY follows two characters, B and G, over the course of their friendship. Together (and sometimes separately), they face the challenges of living as an undocumented person in the United States. In a New York Stage Review by Elyse Gardner, SANCTUARY CITY is said to “transcend politics as only the best and most humane art can.” How did you approach the creation of this story, and what was important to you as you crafted B and G’s narrative?
MARTYNA MAJOK: I tried to approach this story, and most of my plays, from the human and the personal. The characters in my plays are often loose composites of people I know or have been, combinations of aspects of myself and people I grew up with. And the political is an active given in their lives. History and policy dictate certain circumstances and challenges to their lives and futures in this country. As does class and race and limitations of means. And the reasons for and way in which the immigrant characters may have come to America, where and how they’re living, the help of their communities here or lack thereof. The political isn’t really separate from... [READ]