“All you need is love,” wrote Paul McCartney and John Lennon. “Love is all you need.”
But is it, really? Don’t you also need shelter, food, a sense of physical security, health (or at least health insurance)? A job might be even more important for those needs than the right romantic partner, and to get to a job a car sure would be nicer than taking the bus, depending of course on one’s geography.
In Martyna Majok’s play “Ironbound,” the lead character, Polish immigrant Darja (Lucy Carapetyan), lives in New Jersey and cleans suburban houses and takes the bus, if the darn thing would ever arrive.
“Ironbound,” a 2014 play receiving a wonderfully acted Chicago premiere at Raven Theater after a planned Steep production fell victim to a certain worldwide pandemic, represented Majok’s breakthrough. And if you haven’t yet encountered her work — “Sanctuary City” was produced at Steppenwolf a year ago, and her Pulitzer-winning “Cost of Living” played Broadway a year before that — you are in for a great example of her ruggedly unsentimental, class-conscious worldview combined with craft that digs relentlessly deeper into human motivations.
The play is set at a bus stop in a not-so-nice slice of urban or semi-urban New Jersey, rendered here by designer Lindsay Mummert with full-size realism and tangible grime.
The present of the play involves Darja’s fraught relationship with longtime, live-together boyfriend Tommy (Richie Villafuerte), a postal worker with a steady job and a more-than-wandering eye, including for at least one of Darja’s wealthy housekeeping clients. They need each other, sometimes. They want each other, sometimes but maybe a little less frequently. And most of the time, one needs the other more than vice versa, leading to scenes that Majok twists with changes to their power dynamic. Darja’s offstage son — a 22-year-old who didn’t know his father, Darja’s first husband, but felt the violent wrath of her second — is a source of tension between them.
The play jumps back in time about 10 and 20 years to show us the end of Darja’s earlier relationships. We meet her first husband Maks (a highly likable Nate Santana), who dreams of a music career in Chicago. They have a deep connection, but very different goals. We don’t meet her second, but we do see the black eye, as does teenage stranger Vic (an off-the charts charismatic Glenn Obrero), a character layered with alternative complexities of wealth and emotional need.
In Carapetyan’s constantly compelling performance, we can also see Darja’s never-ending internal weighing of her choices. At this point in her life, she has given in to relationships as a transaction, sometimes needing to be expressed in figures. Her love for her son, however, transcends that, which constantly puzzles Tommy, as the woman who often asks what’s in it for her also seems to act against her own seeming self-interest.
In a performance that’s startling for the way your view of the character evolves, Villafuente turns Tommy from a seemingly typical, cheating jerk to a fully dimensional human who is ingratiating and infuriating in equal measure.
Majok is among the very best at capturing the contemporary realities of America’s working class, bringing home the ways people’s daily interactions are affected by larger forces like the loss of manufacturing jobs and the lack of affordable housing. Under the steady, un-showy direction of Georgette Verdin, Carapetyan’s Darja is both an everywoman and a person with specific, sometimes unreasonable expectations, as well as swirling emotions that can cause her to make impulsive choices, the consequences of which she then works to undo.
It’s all very psychologically real, deep, extremely believable. Although as in “Sanctuary City,” Majok does occasionally push even further, in this case with Obrero’s Vic, in a way that feels self-consciously thematic. And some of the layered exposition of backstory and time-jumping here — particularly given Verdin’s choice to prioritize pacing over varying set or costumes in a way that might help guide us — can make the narrative feel like a puzzle to solve, drawing you out of the immediate action.
These are both strengths and weaknesses. Majok takes us so deeply into a world and a character’s mind that we care, and then ambitiously keeps adding intricacies that keep us from settling into a predictable emotional arc.
It all makes for an experience that’s rich, challenging, and well worth pondering long after it ends.