NEW YORK — While most people know about Broadway, New York is full of great theatrical opportunities beyond the 41 theaters that qualify as that title. At the New York City Center there are many different performance spaces, and I got to see two shows produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club. Queens, written by Martyna Majok and directed by Trip Cullman, is a show about immigrants struggling to manage in Queens, New York, in a few different time periods in the 2000s. Set in one apartment in Queens and a small scene in the Ukraine, the show follows eight characters who have various different immigrant paths, stories, and journeys that have led them to the same apartment complex.
As a person who has researched and studied refugees and immigrants, been married to an immigrant, and raising first generation biracial daughters, many of the themes of this show hit in a familiar way. Renia, played in a haunting and deeply beautiful way by Marin Ireland, is a Polish immigrant who left her daughter and family to build a better life and find some value in the United States. Over the span of 20 years and through alluring scenes and situations, we as the audience see in real time the toll and difficulty of trying to live the lie that is the American dream. The play follows how Renia falls apart and becomes destroyed in the process.
Marin Ireland, Nicole Villamil, Brooke Bloom, Nadine Malouf in Queens. | Photo by Valerie Terranova.
Inna, played by Julia Lester, a young woman from Ukraine who finds a way to come to the United States to try and find her mother, ends up in horrible and abusive circumstances. She explains to Renia about the abuse and that she walks from Florida to Queens to escape abuse and find her own mother who had left the country many years before. The story would sound fantastical if I had not heard similar stories for over a decade as a professional in human and refugee services. Similarly, Nicole Villamil as Isabela showed the deep challenge of figuring out if it is more important to stay away and make money, or return home when emergencies happen. In turn, Sharlene Cruz as Glenys displays an interesting family legacy that happens from making the choice to return home.
This show is hard and deep. Each of the cast members were perfectly selected for their role. There was a scene with Anna Chlumsky as Lera, another Polish connection of Renia, and though there was no English spoken, the emotions, anger, and energy were so fantastic that the language was of no concern.
The set, designed by Marsha Ginsberg, similarly reflected the severity of the script. The set design looked exactly like the apartments in Queens that I lived in back in the early 2000s. One of the scenes in the play happens just after September 2001, where Aamani, played by Nadine Malouf, gets harassed after a trip to the store because she is from Afghanistan. The set has an impressive move right at the end of the first act to open up the apartment to allow for the scene in Ukraine in 2016-2017. The way the set shows the difficulty of these women living together in dire circumstances as they sacrifice everything to try and provide something better to feel less invisible in their world is remarkable in its realism.
The level of concern that each of these women felt that they were not enough in their respective roles in life was harrowing. Brooke Bloom’s character Pelagiya slowly gets more ill as the show goes on, and when she delivers the line, “Do you want to hear something funny? I came here for the health care.” The audience laughs, and then as she continues to discuss about how healthcare is great if you can afford it, yet she cannot and has to suffer, she works hard and suffers, they all work hard and suffer, she saves five dollars here and there, but it is never enough, the timeliness of this work by Majok was palpable. In a world where we are arguing about the cost of healthcare and premiums, that line about health care seemed to hang in the room.
Nadine Malouf, Nicole Villamil, Marin Ireland, Brooke Bloom in Queens. | Photo by Valerie Terranova.
As Ireland’s character falls apart, the deeper meaning of the script seemed to come alive. What we do to help communicate that people are justified, valuable, or relevant is a vital theme in this play. At one point Ireland says she wanted to do something “remarkable, in order to be enough.” Otherwise, the sacrifice of her immigration would not be worth it. This is why I find these stories so important. Many people do not know or understand the challenges of the immigrant experience. Again, if I were someone watching this show without actual knowledge of the immigrant world, I might think it overtold, but what I saw this night on stage at the New York City Center was pin-point accurate to the challenges I know are faced.
