Review: Oakland Theater Project's ‘Ironbound' is a one-of-a-kind love story

San Francisco Chronicle​

09-05-2025

Imagine a love story where you don't root for love.
No, that's too simple, and Martyna Majok's 'Ironbound' is all about ambivalence, the impossibility of definitions, the irrelevance of categories. As a Polish immigrant named Darja waits at the same godforsaken Newark bus stop in various eras in her life, forms of love creep in with three different boys and men, and the sentimentalist in you might find familiar gears creaking in your mind — an 'if only' here, a 'why can't he' there.
But in Oakland Theater Project's production, Darja (Lisa Ramirez) herself will likely soon dash your hopes of any wooing with a sneer at and ban of 'nice conversation.'
The show, which opened Sunday, May 4, at the garage attached to Oakland's Flax Art & Design, gets its title from a Newark neighborhood whose name suggests the hardness of Darja's life as a factory worker turned cleaning lady who speaks broken English. Whether it's 2014 and she's waiting to confront her partner Tommy (Daniel Duque-Estrada), or it's 1992 and she and her husband Maks (Adam KuveNiemann) are parlaying their loose change hauls into sexual favors with each other, Darja's world stamps out softness. Love, and you weaken yourself. Hitch your fate to someone else's star, and you might come crashing down with him. Better to count on dollars and cents.
In Majok's astonishing craftsmanship, everyone's a klutz and a dunderhead, but all her fools are wise. Watch how, on realizing that the argument he's embarking on to convince Darja to stay with him is a dead end, Duque-Estrada's Tommy tries to back out of it with a logical and emotional three-point turn, pivoting every which way and hoping Darja won't notice. Or how he has to do a little mental math to confirm that 14 liaisons really is more than 12. As in Majok's 'Cost of Living,' which Duque-Estrada also starred in for Oakland Theater Project, the performer takes a dopey character seriously, underscoring the pathos of trying and failing, blundering ahead without seeing the mess you're in. You start wishing he could win her over.
But then when he fights dirty, he reveals Darja's own blindness and how inhospitable their impoverished world is for love, at least of the kind we've been taught to idealize. A triggered Darja springs to violence like a lioness; you practically see claws sprouting from Ramirez's hands. When circumstance strips Darja of everything — shelter, companionship, desirability, dignity — Ramirez somehow makes her face into an avalanche. You see every facade crumbling away and a lost soul groping for any foothold.
KuveNiemann is just as devastating as an artistic soul whose need for expression seems to pour out his eyeballs, as is Kevin Rubultan as a mysterious bus stop denizen whose many wannabe rapper gestures conceal an aching loneliness.
If Emilie Whelan's direction sometimes lacks a driving urgency and the company's small stage somehow seems too cavernous for the actors to fill a mostly empty set, these finely calibrated performances develop a point that few writers would be able to make in any satisfying way. What if not-great, just-OK love is the best available option? Maybe, when couples that hurt each other stay together, knee-jerk condemnation is just too easy, bespeaking privilege. Maybe makeshift, flawed, doomed, toxic love is love too.