At no point during The Vagrant Trilogy, Mona Mansour’s 210-minute three-acter, did I even think about looking away from the stage. At only a few instances was I less than fascinated by her subject: the contemporary Palestinian plight. My guess is that others, hearing about the weighty issues involved, will have the same intense reaction.
That intensity will likely have much, if not everything, to do with the way Mansour angles into her tragedy. “Tragedy” does seem the right word, although The Vagrant Trilogy, which the playwright has been developing at the Public for some beneficial time, is not defined as such in the Playbill.
Mansour doesn’t mine the headlines for plot, but rather introduces a not necessarily obvious protagonist for this journey. And by journey I don’t mean the cliché “journey” so annoyingly ascribed to the story of just about any dramatic work you care to mention. Hers is a literal journey. Actually, it might be thought of as a double journey.
Adham (Bassam Abdelfattah at the press performance I attended) is a scholar concentrating on English romantic poetry. (I did say this is no straightforward dive into Middle Eastern politics.) For Mansour’s purposes, he’s concentrating on William Wordsworth’s poem about the redemptive powers of nature, “Tintern Abbey.” As a committed academic, he would be well-versed (pun intended) in the full title, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798.” It’s not a few lines, either: 159.
In Mansour’s first act, “The Hour of Feeling,” which takes place in Palestine and then in London during summer, 1967, Adham and fiancée Abir (Caitlin Nasema Cassidy at the performance I saw), though in love, argue virtually non-stop. Hampering Adham’s intentions are his mother Diana (Nadine Malouf), who proves there may be such comic types as Jewish mothers, but there are also matching comic Palestinian moms.
Initially, Adham and Abir are at odds about her accompanying him to London, where he’s been tapped to deliver a University of London lecture on the Wordsworth classic, a talk that could lead to a professorship there. She does join him, whereupon they run into a few university types (Osh Ashruf, Rudy Roushdi, Ramsey Faragallah). When, however, they learn the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War has begun (yes, it’s that 1967), they argue about returning home. She thinks about it seriously, he doesn’t, both acrimoniously.
Mansour suggests that acts two and three, respectively, “The Vagrant,” taking place in 1982, and “Urge for Going,” taking place in 2003 at a refugee camp in Lebanon, are contrasting looks at how Adham’s life might have turned out after his London stay. Neither realization is anything approaching upbeat.
Throughout 1982, Adham, divorced, is supremely anxious about whether he’ll obtain tenure, although he’s somewhat assured of that goal by cagey Professor Jenkin (Faragallah doubling, as all four supporting players do). Spectators may guess the outcome, but Adham does not, although when called on the carpet about a supposed questionable remark he made to a sensitive(?) student, he may have some misgiving. He ends the act at wit’s end, another way of saying he appears mentally at the end of his tenuous tether.
“Urge for Going” has Adham and immediate family sharing a claustrophobic refugee camp living room. Still married to Abir, he’s having his foremost conflict — among several — with daughter Jamila (Malouf). She’s determined to get into university and thereby leave the camp, despite the difficulties she endures while studying in cramped quarters. Her stand-by confederate is brother Jul (Roushdi).
Throughout the brief series of “Urge for Going” scenes, the action occurs with the actors shifting from here to there and back again as designer Reza Behjat’s temporarily dims the lights on Allen Moyer’s meaningfully cluttered set. (Moyer and video designer Greg Emetaz do first-rate work from start to finish on Mansour’s complicated requirements.)
By play’s end, Mansour has made her title eminently clear. In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth includes the phrase “vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods.“ Surely, the use of “vagrant” is one reason why Adham responds so strongly to the long-cherished work (written when the poet was 28 or so). He recognizes himself as a vagrant — not to mention his family members as fellow vagrants, this being Adham’s view of all Palestinians.
Of course, It’s Mansour’s vigorous take as well, or what else is she writing about? Her theme is akin to Salman Rushdie’s recurring preoccupation: protagonists stranded between one country and another, belonging to neither, condemned to live a vagrant’s life.
The always powerfully sensitive director (often at the Public) Mark Wing-Davey has taken on Mansour’s challenging script and, for the most part, handles it in the manner of a champion boxer’s trainer. (The first set furnishing seen is a boxing ring with no ropes that raises and lowers on chains.) While some of the earlier scenes register as a bit flat, the larger number have gravity, tang, flash.
It’s Wing-Davey’s problem, too, that because of the frequent doubling, there’s the occasional temptation, not always resisted, to overdo the differences between the characters represented. The result, not strictly enough supervised by Wing-Davey: some loss of reality, some slide into satire.
In the end, though, Mansour’s vision of widespread vagrancy has the effect of implying that Palestinians are not alone in their unfortunate predicament. Perhaps we all are.
The Vagrant Trilogy began performances April 8, 2022, at the Public Theater and runs through May 15. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
