Marin Ireland and Anna Chlumsky Photo by Valerie Terranova

Women populate update Marsha Ginsberg's convincingly cluttered set of a Queens basement apartment: worn furniture, tiny dated kitchen, single bed with a thin mattress. Majok doles out her exposition sparingly, to the point where we're struggling to remember who's who, where she's from, and what her situation is. This much is clear: Polish-born Renia (Marin Ireland) is in charge, renting out this grubby living space to desperate, disparate immigrants. It's 2017, Trump is already breathing down the necks of the non-native-born, and as Renia encounters the apartment-seeking Inna (Julia Lester) on the street, the tension is already thick. The scene ends with one of them punching the other, and it takes a while to understand why.

For this is a complicated tale of torn families, two women abandoning their daughters in pursuit of a better life, and the manifold struggles to scrape by in an unwelcoming land. Majok's script is awash in stage directions that fail to register ("Renia remains always in control but feels curious and drawn to this young woman"), and the unintelligible passages accumulate quickly.

Also on hand: Aamani (Nadine Malouf), Afghan; Pelagiya (Brooke Bloom), Belarusian; Agata (Anna Chlumsky), Polish; and Isabela (Nicole Villamil), Honduran. We're barely into Inna and Renia before it's suddenly 2001 and we're flashing back to Aamani and Pelagiya, with the departing Isabela assertively interrupting them. It's a fast flashback, but just what year it is isn't always clear, and the characters' backstories pile up quicker than we can always process. Plus, they mostly speak in a pidgin that's probably authentic but is seldom easy to follow. Isabela: "People always think they only gonna be here one year, no more. Save money, send money, don't buy, work work. But they make life here over time by mistake. You think you got nothing, then is time to go and you can't even see the floor." Got that?

The histories come in dribs and drabs. Renia and Agata have some sort of shared past, never clearly delineated. Aamani intended to bring her female partner to America and failed. The basement tenants try to contact their loved ones in a medley of abbreviated phone messages and choruses of "Happy Birthday" that closes the first act, at which point Greenberg's set impressively splits in half. Hopefully to some dramatic purpose–to accentuate the divide between them and their families, perhaps?–but no, it's just to make room for the different location that will open the second act. Fadeout, and we're thoroughly befuddled.

There were a number of empty seats after intermission. And that's too bad, because some of the threads are tied together, and the storytelling's clearer in Act Two. Inna, just before migrating to New York, is back in Kyiv, with Lera (Andrea Syglowski), her roommate, who enjoys casing clubs for rich American guys and urges Inna to do the same. (Later, the two talk politics: "Things it's changing over there in America, past few months, with this orange guy–things it's really not so great over there anymore." Truer words!) It's more involved than that–Inna just lost her grandmother, and is babysitting Lera's kids–but those details haven't much to do with anything. Anyway, Lera's a lively new presence, and so is Glenys (Sharlene Cruz), a firecracker of a character from Honduras who confronts Renia and Inna, now back in 2017 Queens. And we find out a lot more about Renia, much of it through Agata, in a 2011 flashback–can Majok never stay in one year? We haven't been able to size up Renia thus far, but her actions here and later back in 2017 (I think), in Ireland's forceful portrayal, take away a lot of our sympathy for her. Then a lot of yelling among various characters, then some disquieting revelations to Renia about the daughter she left, then more out-of-context "Happy Birthday"s, then out.

Sarah Laux's costumes are spot-on, and Ben Stanton's lighting and Mikaal Sulaiman's sound achieve some fine effects without stealing focus. One intensely grasps Majok's love for these women, afforded so little, expecting so much, and working so hard to find their places in an unforgiving world. An article in the accompanying Playbill recounts how she wrote Queens in 2018, got it produced Off-Broadway to mixed reviews, and did a major rewrite to streamline the action and heighten our sympathies for these yearning, mistreated souls. But she might want to give that first act another look.