Review Roundup: THE REFUGE PLAYS

Roundabout Theatre Company just celebrated opening night for the world-premiere production of The Refuge Plays, by Nathan Alan Davis, directed by Patricia McGregor, in association with New York Theatre Workshop.
 
The cast of The Refuge Plays includes: Ngozi Jane Anyanwu as “Joy,” Jerome Preston Bates as “Reginald,” Jessica Frances Dukes as “Gail,” Jon Michael Hill as “Walking Man,” Mallori Taylor Johnson as “Symphony,” Lizan Mitchell as “Clydette,” Nicole Ari Parker as “Early,” Daniel J. Watts as “Crazy Eddie,” Lance Coadie Williams as “Dax,” and JJ Wynder as “Ha-Ha.”
 

Naveen Kumar, New York Times: In an attempt to imagine alternative ways of being, the playwright has smashed existing artistic forms and created new ones along the way. The result is provocative but messy: While the three acts interlock, they don’t propel each other forward, and Davis’s surfeit of ideas ultimately comes at the expense of a dramatic throughline. But cumbersome as it is, “The Refuge Plays” suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: In The Refuge Plays, Nathan Alan Davis has put together a three-part drama full of engaging small gestures that fail to add up. The drama is Davis’s follow-up after arriving in New York in 2016 with Nat Turner in Jerusalem, and it’s admirably ambitious; this production directed by Patricia McGregor runs three hours and 29 minutes. That’s not nearly as long as some epics, but certainly longer than your average nonprofit subscription theater program (The Refuge Plays is a co-production from New York Theatre Workshop and the Roundabout), especially at a time when most are cutting back. It’s got an intriguing hook: The trilogy begins more or less in the present with a Black family in a house hidden in the woods of Southern Illinois and then steps back one generation with each installment. But as it telescopes into the past, the series falls short of coherence, wandering away from itself and losing the audience.

Allison Considine, New York Theatre Guide: Nathan Alan Davis’s The Refuge Plays turns the American family play on its head. The three-part epic has familiar markers of the category, like parent-child sparring matches and dredged-up family secrets, but there are also mystical elements on stage. The Roundabout Theatre Company world premiere, produced in association with the New York Theatre Workshop, features ancestral spirits and sublime performances.

Average Rating: 70.0%