In an email with several attachments (none of which any of the invitees bothered to read), Morkan (the incomparable Marylouise Burke) invites several friends to her “very big house, on the banks of a large river, just north of a big city” to celebrate Epiphany and meet the honored guest, Gabriel. This is the setting for one of the most sophisticated and engaging “who-done-it/murder mystery/dining room farce” plays onstage or off. The characters are quirky, the setting is eerie, the tone is somber, and the plot thickens like a well-simmered stew on the back burner.

During the beginning of Brian Watkins’s “Epiphany” currently playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, it is difficult not to shout aloud, “One of you must know what Epiphany is” and “Gabriel is obviously not going to show up!” But it is that tension that enraptures the audience for an uninterrupted two glorious hours of transcendent theatre. Who is this archangel-named missing guest? What announcement were they supposed to herald?

Gabriel’s absence requires Morkan and her guests to grapple with their own humanity, search for their own answers, confront their own fears, examine their own pasts, and contemplate their own futures as they eat, drink, and dodge whatever truth haunts them.

The disparate voices of James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, Suzan-Lori Parks, W. B Yeats, and others hide on the stairs, under the table, in the unseen kitchen, in the snowflakes (outdoors and in) whispering words of warning about the “center not holding” and the existential crisis continuing to plague humankind in the twenty-first century and beyond. Charlie (Francois Battiste) echoes Yeats’s sentiment with, “The world’s always been depressing. There’re just more ways to see it now.” And Freddy (C. J. Wilson) quickly adds, “We’re gonna die. We’re all gonna die. Everyone’s gonna die.”

The first text I received after leaving the Sunday matinee of “Epiphany” was titled “The Supreme Court is the Most Conservative in 90 Years.” The sender, a dear friend of mine who plans to move with her wife near our second home in Northampton County, PA commented on the headline, “At least we’ll be able to commiserate – in person – as our democracy as we know it is dismantled.”  Brian Watkins’s play is relevant, relatable, and unrelenting.

Being onstage with Marylouise Burke and Jonathan Hadary (Ames) might seem an insurmountable task for the rest of the ensemble; however, due to the enormous generosity of these theatre icons, everyone navigates through Mr. Watkins’s script with grace and authenticity. No small part of this success is the flawless direction of Tyne Rafaeli.

What happens when Gabriel fails to show up? Yes, ‘that’ Gabriel. If the center is not holding, will there be another ‘savior” for humankind? Or might it be some “beast slouching toward Bethlehem” with some hidden agenda?