From The Refuge Plays, at the Laura Pels.
Photo: Joan Marcus
We often talk about an epic drama in terms of its demands on an audience — time, focus, even the physical strain of shifting around in a cramped chair. But the genre also asks a lot of a playwright: With the audience in mind, if you’re writing big and long, you have to build something sturdy. Clarity and structure become all the more valuable. Legible stakes and clearly defined themes, however heavy-handed, can hold an epic together, whereas more delicate touches — a finely filigreed monologue or twist of characterization — can’t be load-bearing as they might be in a smaller work.
In The Refuge Plays, Nathan Alan Davis has put together a…
