At the center of Julissa Reynoso and Michael J. Chepiga’s “Public Charge,” now at the Public Theater, are two marginalized women who understood something the State Department establishment did not: that fifty years of failed policy toward Cuba needed to change. Julissa Reynoso (Zabryna Guevara), a Dominican immigrant and Obama campaign veteran, and Cheryl Mills (Marinda Anderson), Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff, navigated a male-dominated institution – fighting bureau chiefs who had not promoted one woman to ambassador in decades – to engineer the 2014 normalization of relations with Cuba. That they succeeded is documented history. That their achievement was later reversed makes this 2026 premiere feel less like celebration than elegy.

Director Doug Hughes and designer Arnulfo Maldonado have made a bold choice: strip away everything. The Newman stage has been transformed into a sprawling maze of raised platforms – no furniture, no props, no realistic clutter. Locations (Santo Domingo, the Bronx, Washington, Haiti, Montevideo, New York) and dates (1981 to 2014) are established through dialogue and overhead projections. It is the theatrical equivalent of diplomatic cables – spare, functional, focused on information exchange rather than atmospheric detail. Ben Stanton’s lighting and David Tieghem’s sound design do the heavy lifting of scene transitions, nowhere more effectively than in the nightmare sequence where Julissa (surrounded on the floor by the catastrophic failures of her negotiation strategy) imagines Guantanamo prisoners rioting, killing police officers, burning down Uruguay’s president’s house. The production’s minimalism forces us to focus on what matters: the chess game of diplomacy, the human cost of policy, the slow accretion of small gestures that can change history – or not.

The cast is uniformly strong, but three performances anchor the play’s emotional architecture. Zabryna Guevara charts Julissa’s transformation from apologetic outsider (“I’m so sorry” becomes her verbal tic in early scenes) to hardened operator who knows exactly how much political capital she has and where to spend it. Guevara makes Julissa’s determination feel both personal (the visa denial that separated her from her mother) and strategic – she understands that as a woman of color in the State Department, she has almost no margin for error. One misstep destroys not just the Cuba policy but her career.

Marinda Anderson’s Cheryl Mills wields authority with surgical precision. Anderson makes clear that Cheryl is not just managing diplomacy – she is protecting Hillary Clinton’s political future (“Any mistake will be used against her in perpetuity”). Every risk they take (smuggling expelled Cuban spies back into the US for prison visits, facilitating artificial insemination for a convicted spy’s wife) is calculated against that imperative. Anderson and Guevara create a mentorship grounded in shared understanding: two marginalized women doing what the establishment insists is impossible, wielding limited political currency with extraordinary care.

Dan Domingues gives Ricardo Zuniga – the career Foreign Service officer who initially dismisses Julissa as a naïve idealist – a convincing evolution from rigid institutionalist to pragmatic partner. His Ricardo believes “policy is our bedrock… it’s the Bible” until he learns that sometimes the Bible needs revision. And Deirdre Madigan makes Judy Gross’s five-year ordeal devastating – her stridency masking deep compassion for a husband she believes her government abandoned. When she finally accuses Julissa of being “just another Washington politician,” Madigan makes it land as both personal betrayal and institutional critique.

But “Public Charge” struggles with a problem inherent to docudrama without a narrator: how to convey essential information without lecturing. The play is repetitive – facts about the Cuban Five, Alan Gross’s arrest, the public charge immigration provision, the details of secret negotiations – get hammered home multiple times across thirty-four scenes. Without someone to say “Meanwhile in Montevideo…” Reynoso and Chepiga embed exposition in dialogue, which means characters often explain things they already know to each other for the audience’s benefit. The effect is less PBS documentary (which would have narration to carry historical context) than CNN panel discussion where everyone keeps restating the premise. The runtime could be cut significantly. Hughes moves the action forward gracefully, but even his thoughtful direction cannot entirely solve the structural bloat.

The play also makes a crucial misstep in its final moments. The dramatic climax is President Obama’s December 17, 2014 announcement (presented effectively on screen – a smart choice not to have an actor portray him) declaring normalization and Alan Gross’s release after five years in Cuban prison. That is where the play should end. Instead, it continues to a bodega epilogue where Julissa celebrates with her father while Chino (the anti-Castro voice throughout) warns that “those Communists won’t change” and Julissa exults about Hillary Clinton’s inevitable presidency and “sixteen years of good government.” The dramatic irony is obvious – we know what happens in 2016, we know the normalization was reversed – but spelling it out undercuts the power of what Hughes has built. The triumph is already fragile. We do not need the coda to tell us.

What moves beneath all the diplomatic machinery is Julissa’s dogged determination to do the right thing – not the politically expedient thing, but the humane thing – despite every obstacle the system throws at her. Guevara makes this feel earned rather than sentimental. The play’s framing device (the “public charge” who becomes the public servant charged with reuniting families) could feel too neat, but it works because Reynoso and Chepiga understand that personal wound does not automatically translate to policy change. It takes institutional knowledge (Ricardo’s expertise), political protection (Cheryl’s authority), creative diplomacy (Uruguay’s President Mujica proposing the “swap that’s not a swap”), and sheer stubborn refusal to give up on Alan Gross and Judy. The Cheryl-Julissa relationship provides the play’s warmest moments – not sentimentalized, but rooted in shared recognition that they are doing work the establishment said could not be done, by people the establishment did not believe could do it.

The question “Public Charge” leaves us with is whether any of it matters. Obama’s announcement plays as triumph, but we are watching in 2026 after that progress was reversed, after diplomatic competence collapsed, after the current administration demonstrated an inability to negotiate on a global level and hardened its posture toward Cuba. Reynoso and Chepiga have written a play about institutional memory and expert diplomacy – two things that feel increasingly fragile, even quaint. Is this a story about what is possible when marginalized voices gain proximity to power? Or is it a warning about how quickly achievement can be undone? Hughes’s production does not answer that question. It cannot. But by staging the play now, in this political moment, with Maldonado’s bare platforms and Stanton’s cold light, it makes the question impossible to ignore. The machinery of diplomacy is still there, stripped down to its essential components. Whether anyone remembers how to use it is another matter entirely.