queens

C+

This new drama by Martyna Majok (Ironbound) at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater takes us to a basement in Queens where several immigrant women are living in a crowded illegal apartment. Most of them are from Eastern Europe, but one is from Honduras and another from Afghanistan. Most of the play is set in the basement in 2001, 2005 and 2017, but there are also scenes in Ukraine, Honduras and Georgia (the state, not the country). The jumping back and forth between years and places is occasionally confusing. Renia (a powerful Ana Reeder; The Big Knife), who we see rise from tenant to building owner, has left her young daughter behind and lives with that guilt. Inna (Sarah Tolan-Mee) is a young immigrant who suspects Renia might be her mother. Pelagiya (Jessica Love; Aubergine, The River), Aamani (Nadine Malouf; The Who and the What) and Isabella (Nicole Villamil) are three colorful residents who, unfortunately, disappear after Act One. Agata (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and Lera (Andrea Syglowski) have smaller but still important roles. Three of the actors (Mss. Love, Malouf and Villamil) also have a second role. The playwright captures the texture of life in the ad-hoc community formed by the women in the basement and offers some insight on what brought them there and what their hopes are. As a collection of character studies, the play succeeds, but as a coherent narrative, it needs work. There seems to be a trend this year to rush plays to production with really major revisions being made during previews. The set by Laura Jellinek seems too spacious for a basement apartment, but features a ceiling that lowers oppressively. Kaye Voyce’s costumes help define the characters. Danya Taymor has not been entirely successful in keeping the audience aware of when each scene takes place. Despite its flaws, the play offers a welcome glimpse at a group that has too often been overlooked. Running time: two hours 45 minutes including two intermissions.

Summer Shorts - Series A ** C

The Festival of New American Short Plays is celebrating its 10th year with two series of three plays each at 59E59 Theater. The three plays in Series A, performed without intermission, last barely 80 minutes. 

“The Helpers” by Cusi Cram, presents two characters, a retired psychiatrist (Maggie Burke) and a former patient (David Deblinger), who meet on a bench in Greenwich Village on a cold winter day to settle some unfinished business. It’s a brief character sketch that doesn’t go very deep. The acting is adequate as is the direction by Jessi D. Hill.

Neil LaBute is back again this year with “After the Wedding,” in which a husband and wife (Frank Harts and Elizabeth Masucci) who have been married 5 or 6 years, face the audience in separate pools of light and engage in two overlapping monologues that start by relating amusing bits about their marriage but end up telling about a tragic event that occurred at the start of their honeymoon which they have tried hard to avoid thinking about. Since this is LaBute, there is some sexual content. The actors are convincing and Maira Mileaf’s direction is smooth. 

“This Is How It Ends” by A. Rey Pamatmat, by far the longest of the three plays, is an unwieldy absurdist look at the end of the world as seen by a gay man Jake (Chinaza Uche), Annie (Kerry Warren), the roommate he found on Craigslist  who reveals that she is really the Antichrist and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Death (Nadine Malouf), Famine (Rosa Gilmore), Pestilence (Sathya Sridharan) and War (Patrick Cummings). It turns out that the latter two are a downlow item. The plot is too disjointed to make much sense although director Ed Sylvanus Iskander (“The Mysteries” at The Flea) bravely tries.

The simple set by Rebecca Lord-Surratt features a back wall of louvred panels that swivel to reveal a smooth surface for projections on the reverse side. The costumes by Amy Sutton for the Four Horsemen are quite amusing. 

All in all, it was not a very satisying program. Before the first play, there was an interesting stop-motion short film of the crew assembling the set. The start was delayed for ten minutes by an argument over a seat between a man in a wheelchair and a woman with a walker that forced the house manager to intervene and got a round of applause from the audience when calm was restored. Would that the plays had been equally involving.

The Who & the What ***

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama must have put a lot of pressure on playwright Ayad Akhtar to come up with another play that is equally impressive. While his new play at LCT3 lacks the explosive power of “Disgraced,” it does have much to recommend it. Afzal (Bernard White) is a wealthy widowed Pakistani immigrant who has risen from cabdriver to owner of the largest taxi fleet in Atlanta. His two adult daughters are Zarina (Madine Malouf), a bookish, somewhat aloof Harvard grad who has been working on a novel for years, and Mahwish (Tala Ashe), her slightly flighty younger sister who would like to marry but cannot because tradition demands that the older daughter marry first. When Zarina wanted to marry a non-Muslim some years past, Afzal forbade her and she acquiesced. Unbeknownst to her, he has recently set up a profile for her on MuslimLove.com and even impersonated her to meet prospects he deemed worthy. One of them is Eli (Gregg Keller, "Belleville"), a white convert to Islam who is imam of a poor congregation, founder of a soup kitchen, and also a plumber. In the second act, which takes place a couple of years later, both daughters have married. Zarina has finally finished her novel (its title is the title of the play, which doesn’t explain a lot) which deals with the life of Mohammed as a flawed human rather than a sanitized prophet, as well as with the constricted role of women in Islam. When her family discovers the nature of her novel and considers the devastating effect its publication is likely to have on them (shades of “Other Desert Cities”), a deep fracture occurs. The well-crafted first act crackles with snappy, often comic, dialogue between pairs of characters. The play’s two scenes between the sisters are especially fine. The second act is not as tightly knit and the big confrontation scene fizzles a bit. Unlike “Disgraced” which peaked with an ensemble scene, the current play seems to flounder when more than two people are on stage. The acting is mostly strong. Jack Magaw’s three-module set with filigreed panels suggestive of Muslim art, is quite attractive and highly functional. Emily Rebholz’s costumes work well too. Kimberly Senior, who also directed “Disgraced,” is effective again here. I found it well worth my time despite its imperfections. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes including intermission.