Video: In Rehearsals for the Second Coming of QUEENS

"This play is my life's mission," playwright Martyna Majok told BroadwayWorld's Richard Ridge. "It's a huge thing to be given a second chance for a new play- a new iteration in New York City at another great off-Broadway theater. I'm immensely grateful. I know that this is a rare opportunity and I am here for it."

The play is Queens, and it's getting ready to begin performances off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club.

This epic drama is about hunting for the American Dream, finding family, and facing the ghosts you left behind. In an illegal basement apartment in Queens, multiple generations of immigrant women fight to launch a new life. But when a young Ukrainian woman comes searching for the mother who abandoned her years ago, she forces a reckoning with the impossible choices the women made to survive. Directed by Trip Cullman, Queens chronicles the strivers who sacrificed whole worlds for the chance at something remarkable.

"It's a very unusual thing to have a play that has had its premiere in 2018, and then to have this revision of it happen," added Cullman. "We've taken it from three acts and three plus hours long to now, each act is just under an hour. We've done an enormous amount of changes over the workshops that we've done in getting ready for first rehearsal. And then to be able to be in a room with these actors, so many of whom are from the sort of 'Martyna Mayok School of Acting'... it's a coterie of geniuses."