Marin Ireland, Nicole Villamil, Brooke Bloom, and Nadine Malouf in Queens. Photo: Valerie Terranova

I suspect that when Queens was programmed into Manhattan Theatre Club’s season, it seemed like it would be timely and highly relevant to a New York negotiating a rapidly increasing refugee population, many of them coming from a rapidly destabilizing Eastern Europe and Central or South America. Martyna Majok’s 2017 play (presented here in a revised version that streamlines the number of characters) introduces us to a group of immigrant women–most of them undocumented for some if not all of their time in the United States–whose lives intersect, at various points between 2001 and 2017, in a basement apartment in Queens whose legal habitability would be questionable for one person, let alone five to eight. Majok sketches their backgrounds and their present-day existence with varying degrees of detail, but we learn enough to know where each comes from–Ukraine, Poland, Afghanistan, Belarus, Honduras–and why each has ended up living “someplace away from the rest of your kind of people.” Earlier situations living with their own countryfolk have gone bad in various ways: family conflicts, personal betrayals, fear that whatever caused them to leave their own country will be replicated in the immigrant version of their culture. 

The problem—and this is not the fault of Majok, director Trip Cullman (who does his usual sensitive, rich work with an ensemble cast), or the uniformly excellent group of powerhouse actors—is that the picture of life for undocumented immigrants (hell, for documented immigrants; for legal visitors; for American citizens with accents) in America has shifted so far, so fast, that the play’s concerns and the women’s fears seem almost quaint: “Worst thing they gonna do, they put you to jail,” the Ukrainian Lera (Andrea Syglowski, playing the only character who doesn’t emigrate to the US) says to Inna (Julia Lester) just before Inna gets on a plane to become more or less a mail-order bride. Not “Worst thing, you’re in maximum security in a country you’ve never been to and no one knows where you are” or “Worst thing, you’re afraid to even leave the house.”

This radically shifted context makes it harder to see the nuance in the story Majok is telling, which is of course about immigration (as is much of her work) but also about mothers and daughters, and about the grindingly hard choices women must make to try to find their ways in the world. “Men: is people,” says one. “Women it’s just women, but when women are with men–then it’s people.” These are women who are so used to having a choice only between “invisible” and “problem,”never being the main actors in their own lives, and if they hoped to change that dynamic by coming to America, they’re failing. 

Now they’re not only overlooked, but alone, though we don’t always know why. Their backstories may be fitfully revealed–the barriers that they’ve put up are survival tactics but also prevent them from really knowing or being known in this new world. Renia (Marin Ireland) and Isabela (Nicole Villamil) left daughters behind in Poland and Honduras respectively. Inna and Glenys (Sharlene Cruz) are the daughters of mothers who left them in their home countries–but while Glenys’s mother ultimately returned, Inna hasn’t even heard from her mother in years, and after the death of the grandmother who raised her, she’s equally alone in Ukraine and New York. The Afghani Aamami (Nadine Malouf) and the Belarussian Pelagia (Brooke Bloom) are the longest-term residents of the basement, finding comfort and companionship in their relationship even as their lives feel stagnant. 

Agata (Anna Chlumsky), the play’s eighth character, is Renia’s nemesis–the friend from home who torpedoed Renia’s relationship with both her family and the Polish community in Greenpoint in retaliation for some pretty bad behavior on Renia’s part. And if she slots a little awkwardly into the structure of the ensemble–turning up in two specific scenes to complicate our image of Renia–so does Lera, whose Ukrainian home is the location of the only scene outside the basement. Marsha Ginsberg’s hyper-detailed and realistic set cracks open to reveal a different living room in a different country, in an effect that’s impressive but feels superfluous. 

The play’s strength is in the precision with which it depicts the day-to-day of these women: The way Pelagia guards her milk and Isabela folds her clothes, counting the hours of work it took her to afford each thing she can’t bring back to Honduras with her. The guarded resignation on Renia’s face as she explains everything she owns is in one bodega shopping bag. None of them can afford to reveal how much they care, but they care. Under Cullman’s direction, there’s a constant physical tension in all of the women–poised to fight, poised to run. Even when they’re having a goodbye party for Isabela, there’s no sense of relaxation. 

Each has a unique relationship to English, too (along with Cullman, dialect coach Jane Guyer Fujita does precise work with the ensemble on this): Renia’s accent softens and the firmness in her tone increases as sixteen years pass. Agata and Renia argue in a Polish so sharp that the others can get the gist without understanding a word. Glenys can get fast and furious in English the way none of the others can, by virtue of having come here as a child and achieving seamless fluency. The scholarly Aamami uses words with precision and relish; the still stumbling Inna gets caught between her emotions and her inability to express them. 

All of the women live tied by complicated bonds to those they’ve left–we see this in choral interludes at the end of each act, where the characters become untethered from the Queens basement and we hear a series of the messages left and calls unanswered by children and parents and lovers in home countries. These interludes are powerful, but so stylistically different from the rest of the play as to feel jarring. If Majok and Cullman were going to slip into this liminal space, I wish they’d found a way to weave it more into the fabric of the piece, even into the way the echoes of inhabitants past and present form a layered palimpsest of striving and failing in the basement. 

While all the performances are strong, for me there were two standouts: Sharlene Cruz’s Glenys and Marin Ireland’s Renia. Cruz’s Glenys is punchy and mouthy; her life hasn’t been any easier than any of the others, but she’s still running off an energy that’s been burned and beaten out of the others. And she code-switches more easily into American–never forgetting her past, but able to slide in, by virtue of having arrived so young. 

Renia is Majok’s most complicated character, a woman who can’t let herself see what her choices have cost her, or when she crossed the line from hurtful choices made in desperation to hurtful choices made from an unfillable hunger for more. Her need to be someone has inspired her success, broken her heart, and possibly destroyed her soul, and you see all of that on Ireland’s open, expressive face. 

“I’m sure she did the best she could. This was the best we could,” Renia says to Inna near the end of the play. It’s damning, but it’s also all they can do. And yet, in 2025 New York, I can’t help thinking that they might be safer staying home.