Epic Proportions

Two new intergenerational sagas explore the American legacy.

- HELEN SHAW

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.