Displaying items by tag: Gabriela Barrios

Sanctuary Stories plumbs the line between theater and journalism, and the powerful human dramas both can depict. Funded by a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism grant to create a verbatim-based theatrical documentary, it is produced, directed and narrated by Craig Duff, a professor there. Duff’s background as a video journalist includes CNN, The New York Times, and Time magazine. Sanctuary Stories premiered for a limited run at Northwestern’s McCormick Foundation Center in January 2026, appeared again during the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in June, and now has a return run at The Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture through October 18.

Conventional journalism has its limits, as intensely emotional events are reduced to a factual presentation. In the stories surrounding current immigration crackdowns in Chicago, there is a risk that individuals will have no voice. And that the constraints of style, word counts and approach can leave out the story-behind-the-story, the real lives of the immigrants and their supporters. 

Caonguyen Vu plays Rohingya immigrant, The Citizen.

How are journalists affected by hearing these stories and witnessing the news they cover? 

“It’s a question we grapple with at Medill and in our careers,” Duff told Buzz Center Stage. “I think it’s similar to the last line of the Pastor Beth Brown piece (she is played by Amber Dow), where she says, ‘And part of the stress is you become a holder of the stories. You know, you are a container for the stories in some ways. And I'm fortunate in that I've been a pastor for long enough that I've developed some tools for how to be that container." 

Sanctuary Stories tries to break the boundaries of standard journalism, going beyond the words to include a wealth of graphics, framing videos, and live musical interludes. It is also drawn from verbatim stories as told to Borderless Magazine writer Stephen Franklin, who conducted some 70 interviews. These were distilled into a set of verbatim monologues for individual characters, including three immigrants—The Businesswoman (Gabriela Barrios), The Dreamer (Lori Navarrate), and Rohingya immigrant The Citizen (Caonguyen Vu)—composite characters.

Other real-life characters include Rev. Dr. Beth Brown, lead pastor at the Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church (Dow), Father Brendan Curran (George Dougherty), 91-year-old Sister JoAnn Persch (Jean Marie Koon), and Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss (Matt Specht). Specht also plays a composite immigration judge who resigns in the throes of Trump administration changes to the roles of judges, and Federal actions at the Broadview, IL ICE holding facility. 

“My reporting partner Steve Franklin has covered a lot of traumatic events as a foreign correspondent,” Duff says. “And I’ve seen my fair share in places like Iraq and Lebanon.” Franklin and Duff did a series together for MSNBC about gun violence in Chicago. 

“We have developed similar tools to Pastor Beth's. You have to have empathy as a reporter, but you also need to compartmentalize the emotion and trauma that you witness. Often, under deadline pressure, you don’t live with the material very long because you move on to the next story the next day. On a longer form piece like a documentary, you are spending months with the material, and you sit with it more. For Sanctuary Stories, I am feeling it more deeply because we’re working with the words and rehearsing and then watching the stories unfold each night. And allowing myself to be an artist as well as a journalist allows me to bring more of my full self to the storytelling, and be more affected by it.”

Chicago has a hallowed history of welcoming immigrants. The city began codifying legal sanctuary protection in 1985, as Reagan-era Federal crackdowns increased on undocumented immigrants seeking asylum after feeling violence in Central America.

Duff says Sanctuary Stories is his way of experimenting with new ways of presenting journalism. The project was inspired by a number of things. 

“First and foremost, it was a desire to connect in person and not via screens/TV/phones,” Duff says. He plays The Narrator in the show, a continuous presence through the performance, and singing and playing in the opening song.

“A few years back I re-emerged as a performing artist after 35 years away from theater,” Duff says. “My first role was as the Duke in a raucous production of Measure for Measure, and the audience was on fire—roaring with laughter and then gasping at the cruelest moments—and I knew then that I wanted to bring  my visual journalism work into that kind of room. There is great power in hearing these stories presented live and in person. It’s not that the stories weren’t getting out. Father Brendan appears on TV regularly, and Sisters JoAnn and Pat were once interviewed on Samantha Bee’s TBS show. But combining the actor’s performance with real footage of events (I tried to show the real people with my camera when we could name and reveal them) and letting the actors present the ‘truth’ of the emotion, allows for a more connected — and affecting — experience.‘’

The script for Sanctuary Stories is dynamic, changing with each set of performances. Though the eight verbatim stories remain the same, different casts of actors have performed them. “I rewrite the narration so that it remains current,” Duff says. “I was rewriting up until our preview last Thursday." A new bit was added to the middle of the script for this run— interviews Duff did with photojournalists who’ve been covering the immigration beat. This placeholder section of the script was designed to be updated, with different journalists performing live interviews in that space. 

As a reviewer, the show was certainly compelling, though I came to it with expectations of the more familiar dramatic arc. The actors were uniformly good, while the journalistic-styled script let the facts stand in for ordinary drama. The multi-media aspects of the show (Peter Wahlbäck is sound designer; Riley Bulson is stage manager) really bring home the experience of the melee around the Broadview, IL ICE facility a vivid, emotional experience, nothing like we see in the news. The story of the Rohingya immigrant, The Citizen, delivered in a restrained monologue by Caonguyen Vu, was incredibly striking. We are reminded of this displaced people—unwanted by the Myanmar and driven from their homes, taken advantage of by immigrant traffickers and sold into and endless loop of immigration.

Since Northwestern also has a rather notable Theatre Department, it would be interesting to see them incorporated in future development of this journalism foray on stage. Recomended and running through October 18, 2026, get tickets here to Sanctuary Stories at Chicago's Athenaeum Center.