OUR BORDER TOWN is a groundbreaking new multimedia play concerning the divisive border crisis that continues to unfold in our own backyard.  This world premiere docudrama is crafted from interviews with members of the Tucson, Green Valley and Arivaca, Arizona communities.  Using their real names, these people live and work in or have travelled through our border region.  Among the many Tucsonans represented are the Rev. John Fife; artist & anthropologist Alvaro Enciso; Mexican-born American business owner Luz Demay; entrepreneur Rocio Calderon, and many more.  By sharing their divergent points of view, spoken with their own words, OUR BORDER TOWN creates a collage of perspectives about the personal impact of this crisis, and poses the question: can we even begin to solve it?  OUR BORDER TOWN is a compassionate and very human apolitical play that investigates the massive effect on a people and a community when divided by barriers, both real and figurative.  This WORLD PREMIERE play, brought to life by the students of Tucson High Magnet School’s nationally recognized, multiple award-winning theatre program, is an event not to be missed.

OUR BORDER TOWN is generously sponsored by John & Laura Almquist and Betsy Treman.

OUR BORDER TOWN (c) 2019 is produced through special arrangement with Almquist Communications.  All rights reserved.

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Every playwright who approaches a project starts out asking the big questions: Why this story?  Why right now?  I live in the diverse community of Tucson, Arizona, and was born a citizen of this country, so I knew that the stories of Our Border Town would not, and could not, be my own. In order to write this piece I knew I had to somehow make this personal to best translate the material to the stage. That personal process began to happen as I started to reflect on how much I really knew about the human face of illegal immigration. Through the course of interviewing the people that appear as characters in this show, I discovered how little I knew about the complexities of a topic that had been dividing our country for years… and this was happening in my own back yard!  Next, I wondered: how could other Americans, that lived thousands of miles away from here, feel so passionately about building or not building a border wall? Why did they feel so intensely about a group of people migrating from other countries they wouldn’t even meet or truly be impacted by? Wrestling with those questions gave me a focused goal: to share the stories about illegal immigration in our region from all perspectives. I give you, as I have gotten, the opportunity to be the interviewer - a silent interviewer that meets the collage of real people personally impacted on a daily basis by this complex issue. Our Border Town does not ask you to make a political decision, only to see the human stories of us all.

- Amy Almquist