Theatre in Review: The Refuge Plays (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Jon Michael Hill, Nicole Ari Parker. Photo: Joan Marcus

Playwright Nathan Alan Davis can't help swinging for the fences; he is an inherently ambitious artist. His previous New York production, Nat Turner in Jerusalem, wrestled mightily with the title character, his violent acts and religious delusions, and the ugly legacy of slavery. Davis' latest offering, The Refuge Plays, is a trilogy performed across a single evening, a multigenerational, magic-realist Black family saga that moves in reverse. But, as was the case with Nat Turner, The Refuge Plays' fascinating, challenging premise suffers from so-so execution. It is an overcrowded, aria-packed piece so awkwardly constructed that it almost seems designed to thwart drama altogether. Thanks to some lush passages of writing and at least two first-rate performances, it's not dull, but neither does it ignite: People come and go. Ghosts walk the earth. Deaths are predicted. Myths are constructed. Terrible events happen out of the audience's view. And even as the action heads back to the original sin that launches one family's long-running conflict between isolation and wanderlust, it never gains in momentum or urgency. It's a long trip with little payoff.

The first play begins in the contemporary world, focusing on Early, a cantankerous, half-senile matriarch living off the grid in Southern Illinois. With her are Gail, her put-upon daughter-in-law; Joy, Gail's daughter, back after a period of wandering; and Ha-Ha, Joy's bookish teenage son. They are prone to regular nocturnal visits by the ghost of Walking Man, Gail's husband, who informs his wife that her number is up, and she will die in a car accident the following night. Walking Man has other plans, too: Since the family line is on the verge of dying out, Ha-Ha, who prefers to curl up with his copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, is dispatched to the nearest town to "buy some pussy," the idea being that once he gets a taste of sex, children will soon follow. ("And don't come home with a cat," Walking Man tells his sexually clueless grandson.) Instead, Ha-Ha returns with a nice young thing named Symphony, who appears ready to move in and take her place in the household.

It's an intriguing premise, leaving one to wonder what will happen if or when Gail dies and Ha-Ha and Symphony take up together. But the situation (and most of the characters) are dropped in the second play, which flashes back to the 1970s, when Walking Man, living with Early and her husband Crazy Eddie, is a young adult, having earned his name for making prodigious pedestrian trips around the world. (He talks about having been to Alaska, but Dax, his uncle, insists that he must have walked to South America instead. What's a continent between friends?) Walking Man isn't the only one on the go: Dax, who is pretty obviously gay, is headed for Paris, although Davis has no time to flesh out his character or explore his motivations. Once again, ectoplasm makes an appearance, in this case, the ghosts of Early's parents, Clydette and Reginald, who inform Walking Man that he is the child of rape and Crazy Eddie had nothing to do with it. Walking Man is determined to track down his biological father and kill him, until he runs for the first time into the young Gail, sending his life in another direction.

If you think the third play will tell you anything about Early's violation, you are sadly mistaken. It is now the 1950s and Early and her infant child are discovered, living in the wilderness, by Crazy Eddie. A crippled war veteran -- he walks, in a halting fashion, using a pair of crutches - he carefully draws her out and, after a fair amount of sparring, they come together, forming a couple and deciding to build a home, which, we know, will last into the next century.

So many characters, so many plot lines: Time and again, The Refuge Plays launches another sally that ends up in a cul-de-sac. Some characters, like Joy and Dax, are so much narrative collateral damage: Her seamy career in gentlemen's clubs is used mostly as a punchline, not a character revelation. How Dax, part of a backwoods community, acquired his sophisticated manner and what he plans to do abroad are matters about which one can only guess. The play's central event, the attack on Early and its perpetrator, are left offstage. (When Crazy Eddie asks her how she got her child, she replies that he came from the river.) Early's conflict with her parents is, at best, cursorily described. And, in a play that establishes regular lines of communication between the living and the dead, we never see Early face down any of her ghosts. Indeed, Early, the play's unifying character, often seems so irrelevant to the action of the first two plays.

Furthermore, Davis has yet to master the August Wilson knack for embedding supernatural events in quotidian reality in a way that doesn't seem overt or contrived. The device of the ghosts works reasonably well but Walking Man's habit of traveling thousands of miles on foot and Early's ability to survive outdoors through hibernation feel like literary devices, not organic aspects of the overall scheme. (Among other things, Early has killed a bear and has the skull to prove it.) At the same time, the plays are sufficiently naturalistic as to leave one wondering how Early and the others have managed to exist in retreat from the world or, for that matter, how any of them make a living. (I'd like to say that it's just me, but I doubt that any New Yorker of my generation, when faced with the name "Crazy Eddie," doesn't immediately hear the follow-up line, "Our prices are insane!")

Surprisingly, The Refuge Plays improves as it goes along; the third play, a two-hander between Early and Crazy Eddie, is by far the strongest. This is, in part, thanks to Nicole Ari Parker, who does heroic work all night long as Early in her senescence, middle age, and fraught youth, and Daniel J. Watts, one of the most dynamic and accomplished leading men in New York right now. Indeed, with a few editorial adjustments, the third play might work as a stand-alone work. But it's frustrating to arrive at the realization, after three-and-a-half hours, that Davis intends to leave unaddressed the traumatic event that shapes the lives of Early's many descendants.

It's doubly frustrating because, line by line, The Refuge Plays is loaded with little gems, many of them reflecting Davis' charmingly skewed sense of humor. Gail, looking over her brood late at night, muses, "It's hard not to love people when they're sleeping." She references Joy running "off to become a pole dancer," causing Joy to protest. "I didn't run off to become a pole dancer," before adding, "I barely even used the pole. I was never any good at the pole." Crazy Eddie, casting a skeptical eye on Early's claims about her months in the wilderness, comments, "If you was here since November, the animals woulda had a fight over who gets to eat you first." Clydette and Richard, Early's parents, are given to humorous bickering even unto death. "You ain't hold my hand when I died," she says. "I tried to wake you up, you just rolled over and snored." "You shoulda tried harder," he says, defensively. "I was having a heart attack, Reginald," she replies.

If the director, Patricia McGregor, can't impose an overall arc on this collection of discrete situations, she handles each of them in a reasonably solid fashion, getting good work from her company. Jon Michael Hill is unrecognizable as the older, irascible Walking Man and poignant as his younger self, struggling to understand his mother's strange legacy. Other standouts include Jerome Preston Bates and Lizan Mitchell, jousting delightfully as Reginald and Clydette.

The design team has responded to the production's sprawling demands in a sensible fashion. Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design uses drops to convey a sense of the surrounding words, also supplying a home interior, a yard, and an empty space that accommodates an onstage truck. Stracey Derosier's lighting is especially effective in creating the moonstruck atmosphere of the first play. Emilio Sosa's costumes contribute a sense of period to each play, dressing the ghost figures in natty white suits. Marc Anthony Thompson's music and sound design includes many atmospheric cues, including birdsong, car motors, and supernatural effects.

A lot of good work has gone into creating The Refuge Plays, which, at the very least, continues to mark Davis as a talent to watch. But any one of these plays could, to its benefit, be developed into a full-length work. The playwright's ambition is admirable; with a bit more focus, he will hit that home run yet. --David Barbour