Provocative and challenging Cell has a socially-conscious pulse

As we enter the Tenth Avenue Theatre space, tall, barbed-wire fences flank both sides. Ushers don black vests with bold white letters across the back: THURSTON. A soundscape rumbles in the background.

We are in Rene’s (Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson) home. She enters holding a baked cake and a balloon with the words “Welcome Back” on it. She’s celebrating the arrival of her sister Cerise (Monique Gaffney) and Cerise’s daughter, Gwen (Andrea Agosto), the latter two previously homeless and penniless. All are African-Americans.

In addition to providing her sister and niece a place to stay, Rene has secured jobs for them at Thurston Corrections Corporation. Young Gwen narrates and records the excitement on her cell phone.

Thurston is euphemistically dubbed “residence for immigrants to stay until they are returned to their countries.” Who are these detainees? Women, men, and, children caught in their attempts to enter the U.S. illegally.

Gwen becomes acquainted with the inmates in Cell #293: a Haitian woman named Marie Luiz, and her baby Beatriz. A tragic event deepens the bond and prompts one character to say, “We browns and blacks locking up browns and blacks.”

We meet Leon (Vimel Sephus), a 35-year-old African American guard, whose speech is laced with obscenity. Leon and Gwen become lovers. When they go outside on a date, the scene is marvelously realized by the moveable set: one moment we are in Rene’s kitchen, the next, within Thurston’s American flag-draped, institutional walls.

Revelations occur: surveillance cameras film terribly unsettling things done to the woman detainees in their cells.

One of San Diego’s foremost actors, Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson overshadows the rest of the quartet as Rene. Wearing a gorgeously huge bundle of dreads, her best moments come when Rene becomes catatonic.

Cassandra Medley’s drama raises large questions, but assumes prior knowledge of America’s criminalization of undocumented immigrants. And though the African-American argot is crucial for the piece, at times it is hard to make out some of the dialogue.

Overall, the acting is a bit uneven. There is no subtlety in the range of emotions, only extremes of joy and despondence.

That said, this is theater with a socially-conscious pulse. Provocative and challenging, Cell is a nexus of politics and the arts. How can we remain artful while having what Czeslaw Milosz terms “a moral compulsion to be politically committed?”

In the final scene, Gwen is at a new job. “Price check” is heard on the sound system. But what is to be paid in exchange for citizenship of a nation founded on the values of liberty, or justice?