You’ve never seen a procedural drama quite like the one in Public Charge, a fact-based play now running at the Public Theater. The show, by former State Department official Julissa Reynoso and lawyer/writer Michael J. Chepiga, details the efforts that Reynoso made as a young diplomat in the Obama administration to normalize relations with Cuba after a half-century of intransigence.
We first meet Reynoso, played by Zabryna Guevara with an appealing matter-of-factness, as a young girl encountering a hostile immigration officer in her native Dominican Republic as she attempts to join her mother in the Bronx. We soon jump to her first day at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, where she acquires a hyper-efficient mentor in Cheryl Mills (Marinda Anderson, the sort of focused boss whose brusqueness never reads as mean) and a sparring partner in Ricardo Zuniga (Dan Domingues, appropriately prickly), a State Department veteran who schools Reynoso on procedure and reminds her how unlikely radical change will be to achieve.
Reynoso’s chief skill, as both a diplomat and a playwright, is as a problem solver, finding incremental solutions to challenges that pop up and resolving them within the narrow, sometimes frustrating structure of diplomacy. How do you negotiate with a country with whom you have no formal relationship? Much of her work centers on her attempt to free a USAID contractor named Alan Gross who was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Havana on questionable charges of spying for his working supplying Cuba’s Jewish community with military-grade communications equipment. How much of a quo will the U.S. government concede for the quid of Gross’s release? The issue is complicated, it soon becomes clear, especially since the Cuban government would like to extract some of its own spies imprisoned for serious offenses like infiltrating U.S. military bases. Which could embolden other countries to kidnap other innocent Americans for similar “prisoner” exchanges.
Director Doug Hughes wisely strips the stage of giant set-pieces, relying on a six-pack of plain raised platforms (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado) and video projections (by Lucy Mackinnon) that inform us when and where each scene takes place. That’s necessary because the play consists of short vignettes that jet-set from New York City to Washington, D.C., to Haiti to Uruguay — where Reynoso served as ambassador and coaxed its sympathetic president, Jose “Pepe” Mujica (Al Rodrigo), to help instigate key deals that clear a bunch of roadblocks to detente. But he sometimes struggles to fit the unusually large 12-person cast, including in an awkward, unconvincing scene where Reynoso and Mills try to hold a sensitive conversation in a State Department cafeteria.
As with many a TV crime procedural, Public Charge doesn’t dwell much on Reynoso’s personal life — or what truly motivates her and her colleagues to pursue the work they do. (We never see the inside of Lennie Briscoe’s apartment in Law & Order, after all.) We do get brief glimpses of a New York City bodega where her dad (Armando Riesco) argues with the owner (Rodrigo again) about the utility of embargoes, immigration and travel restrictions, and whether Cuban communists will ever really change or just self-sabotage any and all diplomatic deal that might emerge.
Of course, we also know that Americans have a special gift for self-sabotage as well. The fact that the Obama administration’s Cuban Thaw proved so short-lived — Donald Trump reversed the vast majority of the policies when he first entered the White House in 2017 — underscores the delicacy and fragility of the diplomatic work that Reynoso dramatizes here. It also weakens the argument for the diligent, step-by-step work that Reynoso and others did trying to fix a relationship that did not make much sense for either country or its residents.
A wistful nostalgia courses through Public Charge, a reverence for a recent past when government workers epitomized competence and know-how to produce real change. USAID has been dismantled; career diplomats sidelined or removed. What has been lost is not only lasting change but the idealism needed to reclaim the former status quo. ★★★★☆
PUBLIC CHARGE
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 12 for $99