“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...But cumbersome as it is, ‘The Refuge Plays’ suggests the potential for stories to exceed the world’s limitations. Ellison would have to agree.”
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“At 3.5 hours long, ‘The Refuge Plays’ is a bear of a production, but it earns its stage time...The audience members on board for all three parts were fully on board, whooping with laughter. And in the final moments, when Crazy Eddie’s truck on stage revs into gear after breaking down, the audience energetically cheers. ‘The Refuge Plays’ is a joy ride worth taking.”
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“In ‘The Refuge Plays’, Nathan Alan Davis has put together a three-part drama full of engaging small gestures that fail to add up.”
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“This top-flight cast is strong enough to occasionally distract you from the cumulative impression of witnessing an epic that is a mile wide but only an inch deep.”
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"The Refuge Plays, is a trilogy performed across a single evening, a multigenerational, magic-realist Black family saga that moves in reverse…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…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."
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“This off-the-grid shack becomes a source of refuge for everyone who visits it. And Davis's warm, affectionate evening is something of a refuge from the clank and clatter and confusion of a lot of contemporary playwrighting.”
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Nathan Alan Davis’ "The Refuge Plays," if one pays attention, is exactly about refuge: growing up with it (because someone else has lovingly created it for you), seeking it (if you feel you must create your own), and coming back to the refuge you have always known (once you come to terms with the realization you’ve had no success trying to create it somewhere else). Davis, for the most part, has given us characters that we can easily fall in love with, each with their own path to refuge.
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“I would have enjoyed it just as much had the story been told chronologically. That’s because Davis’s greatest accomplishment in ‘The Refuge Plays’ lies in the creation of engaging, warm-blooded, intensely human characters for whom we come to care deeply.”
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