The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: MTC’s Queens
By Ross
Cracking the world wide open, Martyna Majok’s Queens, the superb off-Broadway production from Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center, unfolds like a memory broken apart under pressure. Trip Cullman’s direction slices across time and place, weaving decades of sadness, sacrifice, and silence into a single shared pulse. The time frame transitions are immaculate, scenes folding into one another not through exposition but through emotional logic and captivating overlapping visuals. The result is a story that deepens as it moves backward and forward, revealing the bitter sediment beneath these women’s attempts to carve out a life in a country that keeps pushing back. And the pain and anger that forever hang on their shoulders.
Set in a cramped, illegal basement apartment, rendered astonishingly by Marsha Ginsberg (RT/Broadway’s English) in a design that surprises, the play chronicles multiple generations of immigrant women whose hopes are tethered to the fragile scaffolding of survival. “Many people have lived in this room,” Marin Ireland’s Renia says early on, and even before we know the weight of the line, it rings like a warning bell. These women carry old wounds into new worlds, attempting to rebuild while navigating the weight of abandonment, invisibility, and the corrosive desire to prove to distant families that their sacrifice meant something. The fight is relentless, and the play never lets us look away from its cost.
Cullman (Broadway’s Cult of Love) gets magnificently raw performances from the entire ensemble, but Ireland (OHenry’s Uncle Vanya), Julia Lester (Off-Broadway’s All Nighter) as a lost daughter looking for her immigrated and abandoning mother, and Anna Chlumsky (2ST’s Cardinal) as Renia’s familial reminder, carve especially deep impressions. The first time Lester’s character, Inna, calls out from the side, “Are you the lady of the house?” the words and fist that soon follow land with a shock that ripples through the theatre. And the flash of pain, regret, and shock on Ireland’s face seems to hold us for an entire lifetime. There’s no over-indulgence here, much like these women. The acting by the whole cast: Brooke Bloom, Sharlene Cruz, Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski, and Nicole Villamil, is fascinatingly grounded, lived-in, and unadorned, the kind of truthfulness that makes you lean forward without realizing you’ve moved.
The design work fills out the space, holding it all together, until it can’t. The lighting by Ben Stanton (Broadway’s Maybe Happy Ending) cuts through time with clarity and mood, and Mikaal Sulaiman’s original music and sound design hum at the edges like the ghosts the women can’t outrun. Sarah Laux (Broadway’s John Proctor is the Villain) anchors each era with her unobtrusive, authentic costumes that pile up like camouflage for an animal trap. The environment feels so real you can almost smell the dampness in the walls, and sense the lingering presence of all the women who came before. And who had to leave.
What ultimately breaks the heart is not just watching these women fight a battle that refuses to end, but witnessing the moment one of them chooses to turn away from her newfound family to chase the faintest, most implausible hope of reconnection with a daughter she left behind. Majok refuses to reduce that decision to betrayal or redemption. Instead, she lets it scratch in all its devastating humanity. Impossible choices are made. Lies are told. And still, these characters press forward, because to stop moving would mean to be swallowed whole, and lost in the cracks of this cruel, new world.
By the time Queens reaches its crushing close, the audience is left shaken, filled with the women’s exhaustion, resilience, their profound sadness, and determination. It is a beautifully acted, sharply cut, deeply felt production. Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival does justice to Majok (Cost of Living) and her fierce, compassionate writing, reminding us that behind every basement door in this city, entire universes of longing and endurance are unfolding, often unnoticed but never unfelt.
