There are family dramas, and there are family sagas. Nathan Alan Davis’ ambitious, nomadic The Refuge Plays, now off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre, falls squarely into the saga category.
In an unspecified forest in southern Illinois, The Refuge Plays spans 70 years, three parts, three and a half hours, two intermissions, and three ghosts. (Yes, ghosts. So if you don’t like a little magical realism with your multigenerational drama, move on.) The one constant, the only character present in every play—Protect the Beautiful Place, Walking Man, and Early’s House—is Early, played by Nicole Ari Parker; she’s our anchor, the family matriarch, and a woman not to be trifled with.
When we first meet her, in the present-set Protect the Beautiful Place, she’s Grandma Early, one of four generations living under a very small roof, along with her daughter-in-law, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes); her granddaughter and Gail’s daughter, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu); and her great-grandson and Joy’s son, Ha-Ha (JJ Wynder). Early’s late son, Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), who was killed by a cow—there was a knife and a struggle, and the cow, you know, tipped over—also pays frequent visits to commune with his loved ones and deliver news, like the fact that Gail is about to die. If Gail has hours or days to live, Grandma Early will not be shedding any tears. “There’s some people in life, no matter how good they try to be, you just ain’t never gonna like ’em. You’ve decided,” she explains.
She hints at “a long, long story that I ain’t gonna start right now,” and Davis (Nat Turner in Jerusalem) does fill in a few blanks in Part 2—though not as many as you might like. Moving backward to the 1970s, in Walking Man, Early is much younger, but still tough as nails; we’re in the same spot, outside the home she built with her husband, Crazy Eddie (Daniel J. Watts, Tony-nominated for his Ike Turner in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical). Walking Man is alive and well, grown but not yet married—a wanderer who looks for answers on the road, in the trees, everywhere but in himself. “I always get lost when I go somewhere,” he tells his Uncle Dax (Lance Coadie Williams) of his trips; his feet have apparently taken him as far north as Alaska. “Sounds to me like you’ve been a few places, but you got to learn to pay attention to what you see,” says Dax, who’s planning to go to Paris just like “Jimmy Baldwin.” Walking Man gets a big piece of his ancestral puzzle from the impeccably dressed ghosts Reginald (Jerome Preston Bates) and Clydette (the inimitable Lizan Mitchell)—his grandparents. But we miss Early’s presence in this one.
Fortunately, the last play, the 1950s-set Early’s House—centering on a still-younger Early with her blanket-wrapped baby—refocuses the spotlight on our matriarch. The only other character: determined suitor Eddie, who attempts to soften her resolve with, among other delicacies, licorice, Budweiser, ice cream, meatloaf, rock candy, Coca-Cola, cheese—you name it. It would be a meet-cute if she weren’t clutching a hammer for protection. Likely the same hammer we saw Part 1, when she walked in swinging a carcass: “Clubbed me a squirrel!”
Parker—widely known of late for her role as glamazon Lisa Todd Wexley on HBO’s And Just Like That—is a marvel as Early. (Though anyone who saw her on Broadway in 2012’s A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Blair Underwood won’t be surprised to see how comfortable she is onstage.) And the reverse order is intriguing: The plays get stronger, and more focused, as they go. Protect This Beautiful Place tries your patience a bit, particularly when Ha-Ha brings home a “friend” at the end; her name is Symphony (Mallori Taylor Johnson), and she always carries potato chips “for, like, emotional emergencies.” Know who else loves chips? Early. But Davis doesn’t reveal that tidbit until Part 3.
The Refuge Plays opened Oct. 11, 2023, at the Laura Pels Theatre and runs through Nov. 12. Tickets and information: roundabouttheatre.org
