Review: Queens Asks What the American Dream Is Worth Leaving Behind

There’s a bubbling core of epic poetry in Queens, Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok’s time-hopping drama about the immigrant women who find rudimentary refuge in a basement apartment in New York City. The play even dabbles in the operatic, a haunting chorus of female voices periodically emerging from the mist to chant their pleas to family members across the ocean (set designer Marsha Ginsberg builds a moment of awe into her otherwise meticulously true-to-life milieu).

When Queens had its first run off-Broadway in 2018 with LCT3, it was praised for its ambition but knocked for its unwieldiness. It’s both trimmer and deeper in its new Manhattan Theatre Club production, directed by Trip Cullman with an all-star cast of actresses pumping blood into Majok’s characters. But like these women who spend their American lives trying to communicate in a language that isn’t their own, Queens still feels like it’s grasping to say something that’s just beyond its limits of expression. At times, there’s more said in the burning desire to speak than the words themselves.

Minus a couple of brief timeline detours, the play wraps its arms around the many-tentacled immigrant experience via scenes just post-9/11 and approximately a year into the first Trump presidency. Fear and frustration sound the same in both eras, and if 2017 suddenly became 2025, there’d again be nary a difference.

In 2001, we find the central Queens apartment in a familiar moment of transition. Isabela (Nicole Villamil, funny and endearing in her mercurial moods) is prepping for her return to Honduras while the Renia (yet another deeply nuanced performance from Marin Ireland) is moving in. Abandoned bottles of liquor from residents’ past cater the unceremonious going-away party thrown together by Pelagiya (Brooke Bloom giving Eastern European pragmatism) and the Aamani (Nadine Malouf, a veteran of the 2018 production with a layered performance to show for it). There are only four attendees in body, but those peripatetic ghosts and the stories in the booze they left behind are equally important party guests (Ben Stanton meets the challenge of moody, late-night basement lighting).

There are early hints that this is a microcosm ruled by self-preservation, and those whispers only get louder as we go. It’s a reason to relish this moment of unbridled camaraderie where women are dispelling inhibitions and selflessly sharing going-out attire (spot-on creations by costume designer Sarah Laux). It’s ensemble work at its best and it coaxes vulnerability from every character, even the mysterious Renia, who is finally cracked open when a woman from her past barrels into the basement apartment for a screaming match (an excellent Anna Chlumsky in the first of two all-too-brief cameos that has her ranting in Polish).

There are a lot of beautifully written monologues that reveal the women’s personal stories and put faces to the headlines that have made immigration one of the most divisive topics in American politics. Those puzzle pieces are necessary and world-building, but they jockey for position with the mother-daughter story that’s at the eye of this swirling storm.

Renia, like our hurriedly packing Isabela, is a mother who left a daughter behind in her country. A relative newcomer to the States, Renia has one plastic grocery bag of belongings. A veteran making her exit, Isabela is forced to make harsh cuts from her overstuffed suitcase. “You don’t even realize when it happens,” Renia says 16 years later to Inna (Julia Lester), a girl who shows up at the Queens apartment, fists swinging, looking for the mother who abandoned her in Ukraine. “What?” Inna asks. “When you accidentally become American.”

The motif of what America compels you to accumulate and convinces you to leave behind is the powerful motor that drives the play’s choppy Act II. Lester, who’s proven her theatrical chops as a formidable singer and comedienne, holds her own dramatically. She’s a welcome presence onstage, even if the play does begin to feel cumbersome in its flashbacks to Ukraine where Inna’s friend Lera (Andrea Syglowski) plants the idea of landing an American husband. We also veer into a scene in 2011 when Isabela’s now-grown daughter Glenys (Sharlene Cruz) becomes a new occupant and bears witness to the climax of Renia’s Americanization.

Queens, for better or worse, is an unending revolving door of characters, but Ireland’s performance bores through the crowd like a laser beam. Backstory is the big curiosity when a new woman shows up in the equally beloved and reviled underground bunker. But Renia’s 16-year evolution—a subtle, creeping process for a precision actress like Ireland—makes everything that came before feel irrelevant. All that matters is who you are when you arrive and who you become if you stay.