The world premiere of Juan José Alfonso’s “An Educated Guess” at Definition Theatre offers a welcome perspective on our broken immigration system and tackles important moral issues, but the 90-minute (or so) one-act still is a work in progress.
This is Alfonso’s first play, written after his 20 years as a media executive, and it’s been in development with Definition since 2018. He’s said in interviews that he based it on his own immigrant experience, but the fact that the 9/11 hijackers all had been approved for visas at one point or another probably also figured in. The most recent immigrant surges and border crises do not.
Set in Manhattan a few years after 9/11, when the wounds are still fresh, “An Educated Guess” centers on Alba Guerrero (Claudia Quesada), who served in the military and now is an associate director at the office of immigration and naturalization. An immigrant herself — from the Dominican Republic as a child with her family — she’s a rising star in line to become the new district director.
Alba is stickler for the rules and more rigid than her subordinate Nilda Jackson (Maya Vinice Prentiss). Her bureaucratic inflexibility shows in her mean treatment of Father Romelio Ospina (Miguel Cohen), a Colombian priest requesting a visa to tend to his flock in New York. Though she eventually gives him limited approval, their interview brings home the arbitrary nature of a process subject to human fallibility.
Then one day, as she’s listening to the news broadcasts that punctuate the action, Alba recognizes a name and, after looking in her old files, confirms that an immigrant she let into the country in 1997 — Bogdan Markovic (Mehmet Can Aksoy) — has been arrested for the mass murder of children at a Boys and Girls Club.
Alba is consumed by guilt and, believing that Markovic was seeking revenge on her specifically, becomes obsessed with finding out why he blamed her. She’s also afraid of losing her job. Her whole life is upended, and even her supportive but ill mother, Teresa Guerrero (Ana Ortiz-Monasterio Draa) can’t reassure her. She leaves her job and goes to work cleaning and cooking for Father Ospina, who all along has offered his help, even though she refused repeatedly and is not religious.
Interspersed among the two-person scenes between Alba and the other characters chronicling her ordeal are monologues by more than half-a-dozen immigrants from all over the world and a variety of socio-economic strata, all played by Carina Lastimosa and Dylan Rogers. Some seem to have a connection to Alba’s family, such as their 56-year-old Hasidic landlord and the young man who works as Teresa’s caregiver. Others range from a Ghanaian woman who gets nervous when she passes the immigration line at the airport to a rich Australian banker who can’t understand the mind-boggling INS paperwork.
While Alfonso’s desire to include a wide spectrum of immigrant issues is understandable, these monologues detract a bit more from the main story than they contribute. It doesn’t help that Tyrone Phillips’ direction struggles to rescue these characters from being stereotypes, especially since most of their accents need work.
Despite Quesada’s forceful and tormented performance, I also found it hard to completely buy Alba’s reactions to her moral crisis. If her guilt simply stems from the belief that she could have prevented the tragedy if she’d followed her instinct that something was wrong with Markovic despite the lack of any evidence in his interview, it might make sense. But she’s so convinced that his murderous rampage was all about her — even though it took place eight years after she granted his visa — that she comes across as being paranoid.
Kudos to the cast for making this thought-provoking work engaging and to the design team for not getting in their way.
