Epic Proportions in “The Refuge Plays” and “Zoetrope”

Once upon a time, I would have told you that the sweetest words in the English language were “ninety minutes, no intermission.” How my heart would leap when I’d hear them! Ninety minutes seemed to promise so much: a zippy evening, a comfortably short time in the theatre seat, and a certain well-machined efficiency in the text itself. Playwrights clearly loved one-acts, too; for the past decade or so, intermissions in new dramas were scarce.

But now we’re hungry for duration. We want heft; we want scope; we want structural unpredictability. In a single early-October week in New York, you could see two new dramas, “The Refuge Plays,” by Nathan Alan Davis, at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, and “Zoetrope,” by Javier Antonio González, at Abrons Arts Center, each one clocking in at around three hours. We call long playgoing experiences “marathons,” assuming there’s some kind of mental stamina required, but, actually, the opposite is true. Attention molds itself to the container it’s offered, and these generation-spanning, epic shows—big containers—give our pressured minds time to relax.

Davis wrote his occasionally wobbly “Refuge Plays” by expanding a one-act about a modern-day, tight-knit family living in a two-room house off the grid in the deep woods of southern Illinois. (This act, which opens the play, is the most diffuse; the later acts move faster and show more muscle.) In Arnulfo Maldonado’s rough-hewn set, the house is a mossy cabin, lit with lanterns, set among tall, shadowy trees. “It feels like church, or something,” a newcomer to the house says, awestruck, as ghosts and living family members slip out from the forest and through its porous rooms.

At first, the materfamilias seems to be the widow Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), who swears that she is the one holding up the “rope” of the family, which consists of her mother-in-law, her daughter, and her grandson. “It’s just that ain’t none of ’em capable of holding that rope with me,” she grumbles. Her dead husband, Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), appears and tells her that she’s about to die, too. “Did we do the right thing? Stayin’ out here? Tryna keep ourselves a step to the side of the world?” Gail wonders. As she accustoms herself to her fate, Walking Man’s spirit orders his seventeen-year-old grandson, the innocent Ha-Ha (JJ Wynder-Wilkins), to go to a nearby town, pick up a girl—any girl his age—and bring her back. (I guess the cabin, with its limited sleeping options, has a one-out, one-in policy on women.) Ha-Ha’s grandfather wants the boy to have a baby, and soon, so that Walking Man’s still living mother, the ancient Early (Nicole Ari Parker), will have something to be joyful about.

In the house and its surrounding clearing, death doesn’t divide the five generations of family members from one another; rather, the departed, wearing white and beaming beatifically, keep turning up to matchmake and interfere. The household is a tiny self-sufficient community, and, in ways that can accidentally seem creepy, these affectionate ancestors get involved when the population needs new blood. (We later hear that Early’s dead parents guided Gail to the house, years ago, when Walking Man needed a mate, and Ha-Ha’s new friend Symphony seems supernaturally dazed when she turns up.) Subsequent acts show us the tying of this familial knot: Part 2 takes place in the nineteen-seventies, when Early and her Second World War veteran husband, Eddie (Daniel J. Watts, nicely judging each line), are finishing the house with their grown son, Walking Man; Part 3 flashes farther back, to the fifties, when Early, clutching an infant, comes to the clearing and stakes her initial claim. The traumatized but steel-nerved Early, in retreat from a world that has done great violence to her, turns out to be the wellspring of the family’s survival. Even at her most vulnerable, ghosts fear her, car engines obey her, wild animals fall under her hammer.

It’s unclear whether Davis is aware of how much grimness imbues his fable—if everyone stopped smiling and joking and cooking breakfast, the plot would be indistinguishable from horror. My uncertainty stems from a lack of tonal control: the production, directed by Patricia McGregor, is frequently clumsy; some of the actors seem unconfident onstage, and Davis has given all of them a difficult balancing act between the setting’s gothic mood and their characterizations, which must career from rural fantasia to rollicking family banter. Yet there’s still some enjoyment in watching a yarn this tangled. Davis is best when he’s oblique, dropping clues about other stories on the core tale’s periphery, such as a magical cigarette lighter (which is never explained) and a villain who may or may not be dead. These untidy ends are more provocative than the moments of exposition. Oddly, therefore, the show’s length is its strongest feature: all those hints accrete in the watcher’s mind, prompting our imaginations.

Both Davis and González use the dramatic epic form to look at the work and the damage of generations: in “The Refuge Plays” and in “Zoetrope,” presented by the scrappy Caborca Theatre, plots spanning decades show children fulfilling their elders’ prophecies, and also, more specifically, how U.S. military action results in lasting wounds. (In “Refuge,” Eddie has eight bullets in his legs; “Zoetrope” takes place mainly in Puerto Rico, where characters speak passionately about—yet never get closer to—independence.) But, where Davis’s writing is wandering and muddled, González’s beautifully manicured bilingual saga displays a spectacular literary control: it’s a conservatory garden of theme and image, precise in every textual detail.

In 1951, Inés (Laura Butler Rivera and Yaraní del Valle Piñero alternate in the role) and Severino (Kevin Emilio Pérez or González himself) are married in Lares just before Severino goes to New York to seek his fortune. He doesn’t find it there, nor does he find his way back to his wife, and he dies in the arms of his New York lover. Inés, abandoned, raises a child, Claudio, who, decades later, will follow his father to New York, eventually starring in a movie about his father’s life.

The play’s title refers to an animation created by two rapidly alternating pictures—the Claudio and Severino figures, played by the same actor, make up one of the text’s many flickering double images; another is Puerto Rico as both colonized territory and imagined free republic. In a vividly drawn milieu in Lares, Inés leans on her sister, Francisca, an acid-tongued, pants-wearing iconoclast who has been tormenting the hidebound local priest Padre Aurelio (David Skeist) since she was ten years old. During my favorite of the play’s mirroring scenes, Francisca (I saw the stupendous Kairiana Núñez Santaliz) and the padre sit side by side, sniping at each other in a confessional—both severe, both elegant—as they discuss whether God or the apostate truly loves the lost.

The production, directed by González, takes place on several projection surfaces as well as on the stage: first, cameras project live footage onto tall, freestanding walls, so that we seem to be seeing a rough-cut film of the play we’re watching; second, translations of the Spanish and the English text appear on a high supertitle screen. This screen exists in the world of the play: when the Spanish-speaking Severino doesn’t understand a vulgar English saying he’s been taught by U.S. soldiers, he figures it out by reading the supertitles. It’s an ambitious and sometimes beautiful design, but the Abrons Arts Center space—which can skew a bit school-auditorium-y—diminished it, washing out the projections and making some of the performances feel unnecessarily far away.

My memories of the tartly funny, hugely romantic “Zoetrope” are also doubled and superimposed: I saw it twice in two weeks, with different ensembles—many of the parts had been multi-cast as a precaution against COVID. I saw it the first time not intending to write about it; the second time I was taking notes, which made me feel, strangely, like part of the show. González, who has a genius for puzzle structures, nests images of self-conscious writing in his scenes: a playwright listens to the sisters talk about their family history and thinks of putting them in a play; a boy dictates a confession of love to an amanuensis who slowly realizes that the message is for her; letters are sent but opened by the wrong recipient. Language in “Zoetrope” keeps leaving one place and arriving at another, changed. Certainly, I wasn’t always reading González’s complex, multivalent text clearly—I caught some political gestures but not others—and, if it were still playing, I’d go back a third time. That, to me, is the mark of a true epic: you get to the end, and you want to begin again. ♦