QUEENS: Character Actress Riches in Martyna Majok’s Complicated Immigrant Tale — Review
Queens, Martyna Majok’s revision of her 2018 play of the same name, opened tonight in a mesmerizing new production with an embarrassment of character-actress riches: Brooke Bloom, Anna Chlumsky, Sharlene Cruz, Marin Ireland, Julia Lester, Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski and Nicole Villamil.
Majok’s expansive work lives up to their talents, and allows each of them to shine, capturing two moments (2001 and 2017) at an overcrowded basement apartment in the titular New York borough. The women making do with their exploitative-but-what-can-you-do situation are all from Ukraine, Honduras, Afghanistan and Poland, either striving towards financial independence or temporarily in the country to send money (or wayward relatives) back home. The particulars of their situations are both immaterial to critical analysis and completely the point; a compendium of the world’s ails that drive people to migrate, and which drive the disenfranchised to build strong communities – well, almost always.
The boldness of Majok’s proposition here is to challenge the ways the powerless can sell each other out. America, as it sometimes likes to remind itself, is a nation of immigrants, but they haven’t only been good to, or for, each other. Queens is blistering in exploding that campaign trail truism. This is no reactionist screed, though; Majok’s righteous politics are evident both in the play’s ethos and in the care she invests into all of these women and their backstories. But – and maybe I’m projecting – the ardor of its searing insight stems from an exhaustion with immigrant double-consciousness, further aggravated when your people, ostensibly seeking progress, court regressive actions. That the onus of moral rot in the play is relegated to some of its Polish characters (Majok’s native country) feels like a pointed missive: it’s no longer just Americans’ bootstraps, but immigrants’ ladders, that are being pulled up behind them.
The production has a slight metaphysical bent, mainly during scene transitions or to tie the women together beyond their literal shared space, that feels slightly put-on, but the rest of Trip Cullman’s staging for Manhattan Theatre Club is dually attentive to his many characters’ interiorities as well as to an audience which spends nearly three hours in a single, not particularly attractive, set. (That’s no diss on Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design which, aided by Ben Stanton’s haunting lighting, closes out the first of the play’s two acts on a striking note.)
Amid an ensemble of sterling work, Chlumsky’s brief first appearance stands out for its sheer fire. She speaks a language most in the audience won’t understand, but her meaning is clear. Ditto the reaction she engenders from Ireland, who achieves something like a silent scream: unthinkable, impenetrable, universal.
Queens is in performance through December 7, 2025 at New York City Center Stage I on West 55th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
