Immigrants mired in an illegal basement apartment vie for the American Dream in the play 'Queens'
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Despite its ripped-from-the-headlines quality, “Queens” is not set in the present-day: A previous iteration premiered in 2018 at Lincoln Center’s Clair Tow Theater. That same year, its playwright Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Cost of Living,” which also ran at Manhattan Theater Club. When the creative team at MTC commissioned a new play, Majok proposed revisiting “Queens.”
“I felt haunted by the women,” she said. “I felt like I hadn’t done right by them.”
Nicole Villamil, who starred in the previous production and is reprising her role as a Honduran immigrant, marveled at how Majok wrote about events that have proven extraordinarily timely in 2025.
“The Ukraine war, what ICE is doing — she was clairvoyant. It speaks to her intimacy with the immigrant experience,” Villamil said.
Indeed, Majok had no shortage of personal material to draw on as she crafted her story about 11 women negotiating how to make a life in the United States. Majok’s mother migrated from Poland when she was a young child. Majok later joined her as an elementary-schooler and grew up in a New Jersey neighborhood where, in her words, “everyone seemed to be from somewhere else.”
After earning a MFA at the Yale School of Drama in 2012, Majok supported herself as a bartender while working on her plays. She was unable to cobble together enough money for a security deposit, and only found stable housing after tapping into the Polish immigrant network.
“Fifteen minutes after speaking with the landlord in Polish he rented me the place,” she recounted. “I practically wept.”
The day she moved into the building in Ridgewood, Queens, she walked through the basement and found old paintings, along with assorted tchotchkes left behind by previous tenants. The objects seemed to speak to the effort of creating a meaningful life even in precarious circumstances.
“That room was at the back of my mind as I was writing ‘Queens,’” Majok said.
”What gets left behind, how do you make beauty, still wanting to have these moments of transcendence and joy, humor, even though you are living so hand-to-mouth?”
The play is set between 2001 and 2017 in an illegally subdivided basement apartment where two generations of women live. While they bicker over who will pay for milk and toiletries, they also eke out moments of connection, even happiness.
In one memorable scene, one of the women picks up a left behind guitar and leads a singablong on the night Villamil’s character prepares to leave New York. (The landlord upstairs puts an end to the merriment by pounding on the floor.) Director Trip Cullman and the set designer traveled to Ridgewood, Flushing, and Jackson Heights to try to accurately replicate the living space on stage.
“When a front door was open, we would peek in,” he said. Even from the outside they found clues about immigrants’ experiences. “You could see how people had boarded up windows to give themselves privacy.”
Villamil didn’t have to do as much research to glean what her character went through when she lived apart from her daughter: The actor gave birth to her first child four months ago. Leaving her daughter a few hours a day, six days a week has been agonizing, but it gave her a sliver of an understanding of what it would mean to be separated from a child for years.
“It is such a gift to revisit a play, particularly when your life experience more closely matches that of the character,” she said.
“Queens” is an ensemble piece. Collectively, the women’s experiences span the gamut of the immigrant experience. The characters include an Afghani woman who was able to come to the United States on a visa to attend a conference and stayed; a Central American teenager, meanwhile, arrived in New York after riding trains through Mexico and crossing the border illegally.
To the extent that there is a main character, it's Renia: a Polish immigrant who left a daughter behind when she migrated. She ultimately achieves a measure of economic security — at a steep price to the women who had formed her makeshift family.
Marin Ireland, who plays Renia, said she sees shades of canonical figures like Eddie in Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and Lopakhin in Anton Chekov’s “The Cherry Orchard” in Renia’s trajectory.
“Characters in those plays are always fighting for their piece of something. That is very much a part of the American dream story," she said. “There’s a corrosive side to that, particularly for people who have nothing to start with.”
Majok has lots of projects in the works. She wrote the screenplay for the recently opened film “Preparation for the Next Life.” For the stage, she’s adapting Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and wrote the book for the musical “Gatsby, an American Myth.” Still, “Queens” has particular resonance for Majok; she considers this production to be a new play, rather than a revival, and reworked the script well into the first week of previews.
She said she wants to give audience members with little connection to immigration a satisfying night at the theater, while also making sure former classmates from her multicultural high school would feel she had been true to their experience.
“It’s basically my mission to make this play happen,” she said. “This is the most meaningful artistic experience of my life.”
