There is something special happening at the Public, and it’s not at shiny Joe’s Pub or at the historic 300-seat Newman Theater, where smash hits like “Hamilton” and “A Chorus Line” have been launched into the world. This time, it’s the opening of a long-awaited work by playwright Mona Mansour, “The Vagrant Trilogy,” at the lesser known Luesther Hall, a 160-seat black box space tucked away on the fifth floor that opens upward like the crest of a mountain. An American of Lebanese descent, Ms. Mansour’s “Trilogy” has been in the works for nearly 15 years. It brings together three acts that were each developed at the Public and have previously surfaced at the Mosaic Theater Company and Humana Festival. Over the course of three hours and 30 minutes they explore the power of our choices, the strong pull of home, and the ever-present promise of future generations even amid our failures. The first act, “The Hour of Feeling,” introduces us to a Palestinian Wordsworth scholar, Adham, and his new wife, Abir, during a trip to England in 1967. As Adham delivers a coveted university lecture, the Six-Day War breaks out, changing the landscape of the Middle East. He is faced with a choice that changes his life path and establishes the play’s “sliding doors” premise: to stay in England and pursue opportunity or to go home and embrace familiarity. Act two, “The Vagrant,” is set 15 years later, in South London. After choosing to stay, Adham is decidedly unsettled: He’s divorced but not disconnected from Abir and is up for tenure at his teaching job. When his reaction to a bombing by the IRA renders a professorship out of reach, he must come to terms with his Palestinian identity. Meanwhile, he receives intermittent calls from his estranged brother in Lebanon, who is heard through the static asking him to come home.Act three, “The Urge for Going,” is both the most labored and the most moving. It’s now 2003, and Adham has finally chosen home. He and his family are settled in a refugee camp in Southern Lebanon — the play’s most disheveled yet colorful set. There is a distinct sense of resignation from all but his daughter, Jamila, who has the opportunity to escape the camp through her schooling. “You carry our hopes and our failures,” her mother tells her. We see how Jamila hardens, and then revives, Adham’s heart.Creatively, “The Vagrant Trilogy” punches above its weight. Director Mark Wing-Davey brings Ms. Mansour’s vision to life with remarkable resourcefulness. Nineteen characters are deftly played by six actors. The sets are sparse, utilizing projections, movable panels, and a suspended platform to emulate disparate landscapes, from English universities to the Palestinian hills. Ms. Mansour’s script is a literary triumph. Woven into an exceedingly complex plot are the words of Greenleaf Whittier and Wordsworth, luminous threads of gold. There is a fatal flaw, however, and it’s illustrated by the play’s own poetic references. In act two, Adham argues with his students against the importance of context in poetic interpretation. “Read the poem out of context,” he tells a student. “Extra-textual context IS text,” the student shoots back. For the audience, it is an eye-opening moment, as most viewers will be required to put aside significant historical context — their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — in order to accept a narrative that does not always align with fact. Ms. Mansour may try to uncouple politics from human experience — and to a certain extent she succeeds — but no matter how beautiful, one cannot read a poem out of context.
