The Audit / The American Dream – 24 February 2025

Urban Stages’ Dynamic Duos has created a really fascinating idea about taking a snapshot of different perspectives on some of America’s most unwieldy policies. The first act of this double bill is called The Audit, and it uses a starving musician (Sam, portrayed by Joel Ripka) ’s assessment by an African American female tax auditor (Edie, portrayed by Disnie Sebastien) who did three tours overseas (both of whom have suffered significant trauma) to examine tax write offs, mistreatment of veterans, how the country finances war, the values instilled by parents that echo another time, and how difficult it is to connect to our humanity after experiencing tough losses. The second act is a completely different play, The American Dream, and it examines a coyote (Efron, portrayed by Juan Ramirez Jr.) trafficking people (in this case a woman, Corina, portrayed by Libe Barer) across the border into America who are chasing a better life that likely won’t be accessible to them as an undocumented immigrant. These conversations examine the pervasive underestimation of immigrants’ intelligence and humanity, the belief that there is a clear cut difference between good people and bad people, the pain of having a past you can neither escape nor come back to, and how much undocumented people genuinely want to contribute to American society. Taken as a whole, this production is about power dynamics and reexamining the prejudices that lead to fundamentally incorrect assertions about what and how a person needs to contribute to their country to be valid.

The Audit primarily focuses on the idea that you have to give up to get. Essentially, you have to pay taxes to buy into the system that provides infrastructure and education (and also funds war). From the perspective of the starving artist who is barely scraping by financially, the system is inherently immoral and he should not have to pay a government that doesn’t use his taxpayer dollars to fund things like health insurance that he thinks are more important than war. To the tax auditor who served her country and lost her partner in the process, this sounds absurd. Edie’s given everything for her country including her mental health and peace of mind— she doesn’t have any patience for Sam…until he panics. There’s a pivotal moment in The Audit in which the citizen under scrutiny locks the tax auditor in the apartment with him to beg her to help him and she has a trauma induced reaction in which she threatens his physical safety with an object she picks up off of his floor. At this point, they both come to understand that it’s not just that the system that is broken, it’s also the people living under it. It turns out they’ve both lost track of the best parts of themselves in the minutia of only being able to look at the future in tiny increments.

By contrast The American Dream shows us people who are prepared to lay everything on the line, their lives included, to be a part of the very same system. The potential immigrant, Corina, has big dreams and a relatively good understanding of how many steps it might take her to get there. Her humanity is not suppressed or dormant. While the coyote, Efron, holds her captive waiting for the money her husband is supposed to wire, she is constantly moving. Corina has lined up plan after plan after plan for how to get the coyote to let her go. Each successive plan falls like dominoes, but in the end, she wins her fight by being willing to kill to get into America— even after Efron turns out to be the child of her church choir director from their shared hometown. No matter how human he shows himself to be, no matter how much genuine pain she sees in his eyes, she is willing to leverage everything she has on this chance at a new life where she has something to offer her new world.

This juxtaposition begs some questions— who do American policies hurt and why? Who do we choose to uplift, and who pays the price? What is the purpose of gatekeeping other people’s existences? Is the current system really the best way to live? Is it even a good way to live? How can we boast that America is the leader of the free world if our people feel so helpless and alone and the dream that we profess to other countries as our biggest point of pride is an outright lie? Marvelously crafted, Urban Stage’s dynamic duos performance of The Audit/The American Dreampaints a stark portrait of American policy but a strong portrait of American resilience and determination.

I attended this performance on a press pass from JT Public Relations.