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Just when you thought Adam Rapp couldn’t get more prolific, he churns out not one but three plays. Rapp’s latest, "The Hallway Trilogy," is a trio of dramas that spans 1953 to 2053, all set in the same tenement corridor on the Lower East Side. Is it worth taking a trip down this long, dark passageway?

The short answer is yes, especially if you’re a fan of this gutsy writer, whose output can be uneven, but who here pulls off a neat hat trick of literary genres: period, contemporary slice-of-life and science fiction. Unfortunately, due to the expansive nature of this project -- a total playing time of around five hours and three distinct designs for each installment. The middle section, Paraffin, is set in the summer of 2003, on the August day a massive blackout hit the Eastern seaboard. Rapp sketches portraits of various lost souls in the building, such as the pregnant hipster Margo, delicately portrayed by Julianne Nicholson, married to dead-end rocker and junkie Denny, that’s the gung-ho William Apps. Denny’s wheelchair-bound ex-soldier brother, Lucas, played with vicious cool by Jeremy Strong, lurks on the sidelines, slinging bitter jokes and barely hiding his love for his sister-in-law. Then, as expected, the lights go out and compassion vies with cruelty in the darkness. We only have photographs for the other two plays, Rose, set in 1953 and concerning a delusional actress who thinks that the recently deceased playwright Eugene O’Neill lives in the building, and Nursing, set in 2053 when the building has been converted into a living museum devoted to disease.

All in all, "The Hallway Trilogy" is a singular undertaking: Rapp and his 14-strong company of actors, two extra directors and an ace design crew create a novelistic parade of lost souls, each stranded in a emotional or psychological limbo, symbolized, of course, by the hallway.

Despite the shaggy-dog aspects of the enterprise, Rapp remains a potent writer with a vivid theatrical imagination. "The Hallway Trilogy" might not lead anywhere, but the trip is rather exciting.