Early in Nathan Alan Davis’s stunning and poetic family saga The Refuge Plays, the matriarch offers her 17-year-old great-grandson advice on reading Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man. “Ralph and them, they put messages in code. Got to keep reading the code til it cracks. Til you know what the words are tryin to say to you.” The same logic applies to Davis’s impressive three-and-a-half-hour drama, which begins in the backwoods Illinois home of an elderly woman named Early (Nicole Ari Parker), a glorified shack that despite a lack of running water or electricity has become both a refuge and retreat for four generations of her rural Black family.

Early shares the space with her overworked daughter-in-law, Gail (Jessica Frances Dukes), the target of her frequent needling zingers; Gail’s daughter, a former pole dancer and single mom, Joy (Ngozi Anyanwu); and Gail’s 17-year-old son, a shy bookworm with the improbable name of Ha-Ha (JJ Wynder) whom Early would really like to start focusing on the next generation of the family. But the spare clapboard home (rendered in broad strokes by set designer Arnulfo Maldonado) has other inhabitants, too, including the white-suited ghost of Early’s son and Gail’s late husband, Walking Man (Jon Michael Hill), and later the ghosts of Early’s sharp-tongued parents as well (Lizan Mitchell and Jerome Preston Bates).

Davis has a masterful command of scene-setting, developing his characters in a space that suggests a familiar reality as well as one that can embrace magical realism. Suspension of disbelief helps, particularly in an overlong first act where Ha-Ha brings home a prospective girlfriend named Symphony (a delightfully wide-eyed Mallori Taylor Johnson) who seems improbably intrigued by a family that has shunned most modern amenities. He also allows his characters to step out of the scene to provide narration or deliver inner monologues.

Each of the play’s three acts ends with the meet-cute of another generation of the family. In the ’70s-set second act, Walking Man wanders back home after years of wandering on foot, from Canada to Alaska, only to meet Gail as she’s escaping from her own parents in nearby Cairo, Illinois. And the magnificent third act, set in the ’50s, Early meets her husband, Eddie (Daniel J. Watts), in the same wooded patch where there home will soon be — he limping from bullet wounds from the war, and she nursing her newborn son that she’s somehow managed to keep alive while living alone in the outdoors. We watch as these two reticent outcasts forge a tentative connection that might eventually blossom into love.

None of these circumstances are very probable, and the first two acts can meander with a lack of focus. But Davis’s language is both poetic and conversational, like August Wilson blended with Gabriel García Márquez. Plus, he has a wonderful way of foreshadowing plot points that chronologically come before but that we see unfold later on, often with twists that cast new light on what we thought we knew. More impressively, director Patricia McGregor keeps even the most symbolic bits of stage business and the feints at profundity grounded in the here and now. (The ghosts kiss the foreheads of their sleeping progeny, as if tucking them in for the night.)

“I shouldn’t lie to you and make it sound like the movies. It wasn’t,” Early tells Joy of her romance with her late husband. “He loved me like the movies. But I was with him just… well, just to get away, really. Took a while for the love to set in on my end.” (Later, Eddie chooses a similar metaphor to describe how his care in an army field hospital “ain’t like no movie up in there.”)

There’s a lot to unpack in The Refuge Plays, an epic yarn on an intimate scale that is elevated by Nicole Ari Parker’s mesmerizing performance as a singularly forthright woman at three stages of her life. Tentative but strong as a young mother, a more commanding woman of action in middle age, and then an aged matriarch unwilling to soften despite her physical decline. She’s an indomitable force of nature, and her journey is a rewarding one.