Simpatico Theatre Project presents Martyna Majok's 'Ironbound'

Not so in Simpatico Theatre Project’s Ironbound, directed with wisdom and insight by Harriet Power. Colin McIlvaine’s minimalist portrayal of a dingy bus stop in a decrepit Elizabeth, New Jersey, lot across from an abandoned factory feels realistically ruined, like the moon’s lifeless surface. The black curtains ringing the small yet deceptively spacious Louis Bluver Theatre soak up designer Jerold R. Forsyth’s subtly bleak light like a vast black hole.

The characters conjured by playwright Martyna Majok look, sound, and act like prisoners of this desolate landscape. Julianna Zinkel is simply superb – as in best-of-the-year, blow-my-mind outrageously magnetic and utterly convincing – as 42-year-old Polish immigrant Darja, who’s just trying to survive and hoping to find her 22-year-old son, a drug addict who has absconded with her car. Even more impressive, she never leaves the stage, successfully navigating shifts from 2014 to 1992 and 2006 -- all at that same purgatorial bus stop.

American dreamer awakes

Darja spars with boyfriend Tommy (Allen Radway), who begs, cajoles, and bullies her to come home. She’s sick of his cheating. “I have no time for stupid,” she says in her thick Polish accent (dialect coach Matthew Hultgren), and that’s all the hockey-loving postman offers. After six years together, Darja knows him backward and forward.

He’s hazy about her background and thinks “all those communists and Nazis and shit” have fucked her up. Instead, what really makes her cynical and pragmatic is working demeaning jobs for unlivable wages.

Ironbound gives us an immigrant’s point of view about the difficulties of succeeding in modern America, but also explores issues of poverty and class that cross ethnic lines.

Darja’s flashbacks take us to 1992 and her first husband, fellow Pole Maks (Mitchell Bloom), and their idealistic American dreams. The second, to 2006, introduces Joseph Acquaye as Vic, a black teen from an affluent neighborhood who befriends Darja at a particularly grim moment when she’s trying to sleep at the bus stop after escaping her brutal second husband.

Fair trade

Tommy returns again and again, but Darja doesn’t give in to his rough charms. Instead, she negotiates: “What will you give me?” she asks, knowing that he needs her more than she needs him. Radway excels at loveable lunkheads and expertly balances Tommy’s attempts at romance with his faults and failings. Bloom and Acquaye, who also choreographed the play’s violence, are utterly genuine as well, but all orbit Zinkel’s desperate, almost feral Darja, whose intelligence and determination move us to hope for her despite all her obstacles.

Few plays show the plight of people on society’s margins so well, and only a very skillful production could reveal Ironbound’s bleak world – and the love, humor, and hope that survive in it, despite all – so truthfully.