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Jane Guyer Fujita

Queens

November 8, 2025

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Martyna Majok, who has specialized in plays about the immigrant experience like Ironbound and Sanctuary City, has revised her play Queens first seen at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3 in 2018. The new version now at Manhattan Theatre Club Stage I at New York City Center still with an all-female cast has three fewer characters and is now in two acts instead of three. However, the play, though still powerful and authentic, continues to be confusing as it goes back and forth between scenes in the borough of Queens in 2017, 2001 and 2011, and with two middle scenes set in the Ukraine in 2016. Mostly taking place in the same basement apartment in New York, at one point women from both 2001 and 2017 are on stage simultaneously. It is all a little bit difficult to keep the chronology straight. [more]

The Swamp Dwellers

April 14, 2025

Before he was a Nobel laureate, before his name was canonized in the firmament of world literature, Wole Soyinka was a young playwright—barely in his mid-twenties—when he penned "The Swamp Dwellers" in 1958. And yet, this early work bears the unmistakable gravitas of myth: a compact, hour-long domestic drama that pulses with elemental force. In director Awoye Timpo’s hauntingly grounded revival, the piece reverberates with contemporary resonance. It is at once a family portrait and a parable, steeped in the muddy waters of postcolonial Nigeria and rippling outward into modern-day concerns—climate change, disillusionment with institutions, and the aching silence left by absent gods. [more]