Mansour has calibrated the narrative stress so expertly that in each individual actuality we are deeply invested in the fates of her characters, between them Adham’s mother, Beder, embodied by Nadine Malouf as a amusing, formidable, thoroughly unsentimental girl who has fought to give her amazing boy the ideal probable likelihood in a hostile earth. Her other son, Hamzi (Osh Ashruf), is a light, kindly gentleman whom she left driving as a boy or girl, with his father, in that refugee camp, where he spends decades of his everyday living.
Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, as Abir, and Bassam Abdelfattah, as Adham, acquit by themselves honorably. Still probably since they are understudies, they draw their characters in broader strokes than they may if they experienced much more time to settle into this sort of significant roles. (Tala Ashe and Hadi Tabbai, equally superb Off Broadway in “English” this spring, ordinarily participate in Abir and Adham.) They are surrounded by a stable firm, even if some accents get slippery in the London scenes.
Individuals scenes are generally enjoyment, nevertheless, in particular the visuals Allen Moyer’s sets, Dina El-Aziz’s costumes and Tom Watson’s wigs evoke the ’60s and ’80s to delightful impact. (Lighting by Reza Behjat sound by Tye Hunt Fitzgerald and Sinan Refik Zafar and online video by Greg Emetaz are also fantastic.) Malouf has comic magnetism as a flirtatious ’60s Londoner in amazing orange slingbacks who can’t continue to keep her hand off Adham’s thigh, though Ramsey Faragallah is eccentrically amusing as a floppy-haired — and, it turns out, bigoted — ’80s professor who stirs his tea with the eraser finish of his pencil.
With Wordsworth’s poetry a motif throughout the trilogy, Mansour examines the sustaining psychic electric power of a beloved landscape — a household that a person could depart but must be equipped to revisit. And via the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali’s “Abd el-Hadi Fights a Superpower,” a chunk of which can make an impacting monologue by Hamzi in the 3rd enjoy, Mansour implies the silent tragedy of the geopolitical bystander: “His God-specified rights are a grain of salt tossed into the sea.”
It is in this last section of the trilogy that we meet up with the two tightly bonded characters most probable to smash our hearts: Abir and Adham’s teenage daughter, the ebulliently bold Jamila (Malouf, at her most splendid), and her susceptible brother, Jul (Rudy Roushdi, tenderly pretty). As bookish as Adham, Jamila is finding out to get into higher education and join the broader earth.
For now, while, she nonetheless sometimes pretends with Jul that he is a communicate-display host and she a marvelously effective guest with a string of doctorates.
“How did you get out of the refugee camp?” he asks.
“Well, it is a extensive story,” she says.
The Vagrant Trilogy
By means of Could 15 at the Community Theater, Manhattan publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes.