Every relationship has its balance of give and take, but for Darja, a Polish immigrant who works as a cleaner in New Jersey, such negotiations require concrete terms and conditions. Rent money. Health insurance. A car.
“I weigh you on scale, and I think, ‘OK,’” she quips to Tommy, the postal worker she’s lived with for nearly seven years after her previous two marriages.
Love doesn’t seem to factor much into the equation, but it’s not that Darja is purely mercenary. Rather, she’s been failed enough times — by men, employers and her adopted country’s threadbare social safety net — that she learns to use whatever leverage she can to meet her basic needs.
Lucy Carapetyan plays this plucky, wryly funny woman in Raven Theatre’s Chicago premiere of “Ironbound” by Martyna Majok. Born in Poland and raised in New Jersey and Chicago, Majok won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Cost of Living,” which was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. “Ironbound” is an earlier work, penned in 2014 and performed off-Broadway in 2016.
Directed by Georgette Verdin, the play spans 22 years but is set in a single location: a rundown bus stop near a factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey’s fourth largest city. Lindsay Mummert’s grimy, graffitied set and Eric Watkins’ florescent lighting capture the grim atmosphere of a space where people with no other options wait hours for a bus that may or may not come.
We first meet 42-year-old Darja as she confronts Tommy (Richie Villafuerte) for sleeping with one of her wealthy employers. In fact, she has tapped his phone and learned of multiple affairs over the years. So why bring it up now? She needs money to go looking for her 22-year-old son, who struggles with an unspecified addiction and has run off with her car. Tommy, who relies on Darja’s domestic labor and is afraid of being alone, just might pay out if she’ll agree to stay with him.
The next scene flashes back to Darja’s pregnancy and her marriage to Maks (Nate Santana), the young husband she followed to the United States. A dreamer who hopes to make his mark on Chicago’s blues scene, Maks is wholly unprepared for the news that he is to become a father. This revelation sucks the oxygen out of a previously romantic moment, and the doom of Darja’s first marriage is written all over his shocked face.
As the play skips around in time, we glimpse more episodes in Darja’s life: her job at a paper factory where a friend nearly lost an arm to a machine, her second marriage to a violent boss and the loss of that job when the factory closed.
The sweetest, funniest vignette incongruously arrives at one of Darja’s lowest moments, when she tries to sleep at the bus stop after her second husband gives her a black eye. As she curls into a ball on a piece of cardboard, she’s interrupted by Vic (Glenn Obrero), a closeted gay kid who attends a local prep school and moonlights as a male escort. In contrast to the men in her life, this teenage boy tries to help her and makes no demands in return. He gets her to laugh with a goofy rap and offers to buy her a meal and a hotel room, finally convincing her to accept $100 in cash.
The play’s framing around Darja’s interactions with men leaves her inner life somewhat enigmatic. Beyond her devotion to her son and her vague wish to be somewhere other than her physically taxing workplaces, we don’t learn much about her hopes and dreams. But this seems to be the point: she spends so much of her time, energy and relationship capital trying to keep herself and her son housed, fed and healthy that she can’t afford to have her head in the clouds. As she says to Tommy, he couldn’t possibly understand her situation; he’s never had to ride that bus.
If this all sounds a bit bleak, well, yes, but “Ironbound” isn’t poverty porn. It’s a clear-eyed look at the negotiations and sacrifices that one woman makes as she tries to get by in America. Characters are morally ambiguous; relationships have power imbalances, and there is no tidy ending. As in many immigrant stories told onstage, resilience is a key theme, but this never comes across as simplistically rosy here. If anything, Darja’s final words sum up her biting humor and weary determination: “F*** this bus.”
Review: “Ironbound” (3 stars)
When: Through Oct. 27
Where: Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark St.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Tickets: $45 at raventheatre.com
Emily McClanathan is a freelance critic.
