Stage

...As a testimony, a lament, a plea for all our concern, it is very effective...

...She attempts to be fair in circumstances that could have reduced the material to satiric cartoon...

...STAGE ASYLUM DENIED GALLAGHER'S 'DE DONDE?' When the Festival Latino played at Joseph Papp's Public Theater last summer, each of the offerings carried a label indicating the country of its origin...

...Her play, a combination of documentary and sentimental vignettes, is set in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, in a context in which that question can be dangerous, even fatal...

...If, however, the answer is "Guatemala," "El Salvador," or some other Central American country which Washington refuses to recognize as a danger to its own citizens, the refugee ends up in a processing center where he or she waits for a hearing to request asylum, a request which is almost certain to be denied...

...We file a thousand asylum claims a year," says Lynne, head of a law firm working with the detainees...

...GERALD WEALESGERALD WEALES...

...There are Hispanic characters who see the illegals as threats to their own precariously held positions...

...those who are a comfortable part of the rejecting establishment...

...there may well be romantic unions along the Rio Grande, but this one seems to grow out of Gallagher's desire for a positive note in a situation in which Oscar's story is the expected one...

...That is the production which came to the Public Theater...

...but the person who saw it with me-a regular playgoer-often lost track of the changing roles, particularly when an actor with a recognizable presence stepped offstage and came back as someone else...

...My use of American here is admittedly provincial, but unit-edstatesian is awkward and Yankee (or Yanqui) sounds better in the mouths of those facing our border patrols and agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service...

...To avoid making De Donde...

...If the answer is "Mexico"-whether the answerer is Mexican or has simply learned that this is a good answer-the refugee will simply be put back across the border where he or she can try again and again, hoping finally to elude the patrols...

...Mary Gallagher, a playwright and novelist, an actor (she was in this production) and director, did research in Texas for this play, which was produced in Houston and Woodstock and published in American Theatre (November 1989) before it was staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park...

...The slowly developing attachment between Pete, an Anglo paralegal, and La Extraha, who-at first out of fear, then out of policy-will not answer the titular question and so cannot be deported, ends sentimentally in their marriage...

...A nun's decision to risk her own freedom and the shelter she runs to smuggle out of the area a young man who faces certain deportation and death is romanticism of a more acceptable kind because surely the tradition of the Underground Railroad is still alive in this country...

...is "the first question which INS agents ask Hispanics whom they suspect of being aliens...

...Since I had read the play, I had no trouble following the abrupt shifts...

...As a theater piece, De Donde...

...When asked how many she has got asylum for in the last three years, she holds up three fingers...

...In notes accompanying the published edition, Gallagher explains that De Donde?-"Where are you from...

...But even these are presented with an edge...

...simply an animated editorial, a walking, talking information-giver, Gallagher has provided stories to give flesh to the material...

...The play was De Donde...

...The play is designed to be performed by thirteen Hispanic and Anglo actors, playing forty roles...

...those who see the INS as an employer who allows them to escape the minimum-wage, fast-food trap...

...The scenes are often brief and much of the material is not so much dramatic as announced-letters, petitions, evidence, recited by sympathetic characters...

...The good-guy Anglo lawyers are unwittingly condescending to the Hispanics with whom they work...

...A cuckoo in that Central and South American nest was one identified as coming from Cincinnati, Ohio...

...Oddly, she more often produces dramatic stereotypes...

...Not grievously, since there was no mistaking the political thrust of the work...

...There is an inevitable vicious guard in the processing center, but the chief villains are indifference, letter-of-the-law nitpicking, and, of course, the offstage Washington policy that sees abstractions where there are suffering people...

...There are Anglos-the lawyers, two nuns-who devote themselves to the cause of the detainees...

...Despite the Spanish title, it is an American play by an American author concerning a problem that is as much ours as it is that of the refugees from Central America...

...The result is deportation which-as with Oscar in this play-may mean execution when he is returned to his home country...

...has obvious weaknesses...

...In a way, Gallagher's attempt to present a wide range of characters muddled the line of her play...