How many times can you go back to that proverbial old oaken bucket that hung in the well, the well in this case being the environs of Rhinebeck, N.Y., where longtime formerly middle-class liberals are being pushed out by ritzy interlopers from lower down on the Hudson?
Eight times it seems, thus far, if your name is Richard Nelson. In 2010, the industriously accomplished playwright/director—35 years into his career—turned his attention to Rhinebeck and its denizens. That Hopey Changey Thing was the first of four complete plays, produced over four years, featuring what he named The Apple Family. In 2016, he gave us three additional plays, centering upon a second neighboring family called The Gabriels.
The seven plays were all keyed to specific political events. The last of the Gabriel Plays ended in thorough disaster—not dramaturgical but historical—when it premiered on election night 2016, with the gala opening night celebration in the Public Theater lobby swallowed up whole by the increasingly dire electoral results transmitted by ghostly-pale commentators from a bank of large-screen televisions.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★ review here.]
Now it’s back to Rhinebeck for The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times. We won’t say that the plays have gotten better as they’ve come along, because they have been mostly excellent from the first. Or else we might not have seen additional plays in the series, would we? But Conversations During Difficult Times stands near the head of the group.
Nelson’s plays have been what we might well call “kitchen-sink drama,” as aging baby boomers sit around the pantry preparing, cooking, and eating dinner. (In the present case, it appears that the baguettes and quiche are literally baking in the onstage oven in real time.) Rose Michael (Brenda Wehle) is a legendary modern choreographer, now in the throes of stage 4 ovarian cancer. She is all but surrounded by dancers: two of her former principal dancers from the old days, Sally (Rita Wolf) and Irenie (Haviland Morris), plus her daughter, Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell), and niece May (Matilda Sakamoto), who are reconstructing three of Rose’s early pieces for a retrospective.
Two of the key players—in some ways closest to Rose, both formerly and currently—are non-dancers, and thus stand estranged and apart from the world of the others. These are Rose’s ex-husband and Lucy’s father, David (Jay O. Sanders), who lives in the adjacent farmhouse with his current wife (Sally, as it happens), and Rose’s current partner and caregiver Kate (Maryann Plunkett), a recently retired local history teacher whose students had included Lucy. (Kate mentions in passing that she is in a choir with fellow ex-teacher Barbara Apple, who was played in the Apple Family plays by…Maryann Plunkett.)
If all this seems somewhat too intricate to instantly unravel, that is to Nelson’s purpose. The play begins with David—a theatrical producer, and former manager of the Rose Michael Dance Company—discussing the “very solemn, almost spiritual, almost mystical world” of the creators of dance and, by extension, drama. Sanders almost whispers this, continuing in the tradition of Nelson’s series; the director (Nelson himself) seems to demand that the audience sit forward, straining and struggling to hear and understand what’s being said while purposely making that not quite practical.
Certainly, the complicated interrelationships are hidden from the audience. Nelson wants us to wonder, apparently, just whom is related—and in what matter—to whom. This becomes crystal-clear an hour or so into the play; but this eventual crystallization is one of the beacons of the evening. Rather than an onion peeling, Nelson proceeds as if he is building a 30-piece jigsaw puzzle—not all that difficult, except he starts by offering us only one piece at a time. If this is not your type of entertainment, be forewarned. Conversations is immensely rewarding, but theatergoers who want to sit back and just laugh at the jokes might prefer to spend their two hours elsewhere.
The play centers on dance and its ephemeral nature. You can watch modern re-creations on your iPhone or old videos on—well, video—but that doesn’t begin to express the nature of what was. As the play culminates, Nelson has his two young-dancer cast members perform—barefoot, in the kitchen—three short pieces, which bridge the gap between dance and life and drama. (These were choreographed in the 1970s not by the fictional Rose Michael but by choreographer Dan Wagoner, who is duly credited.)
As with the seven plays that preceded it, Conversations is impeccably played by actors who precisely capture the intentions of their playwright/director. Wehle, as the ailing choreographer, is commanding, while Wolf and Morris straddle the fine line of being Rose’s favored dancers despite the often malevolent condescension she can’t be bothered to hide. Bydwell and Sakamoto play their roles as the younger dancers admirably, and stun us with their dance displays.
Which leaves us with Plunkett and Sanders, always-excellent veteran actors who happen to be real-life spouses. What would Plunkett and Sanders do without Nelson? And what would Nelson do without Plunkett and Sanders? The answer, to paraphrase our 20th-century Bard of Turtle Bay, is “just what they usually do.” Sanders is soft-spoken, and—as in the other seven plays of the series—often the odd man out in a world (and dramatis personae) mostly of women. We watch the actor up there, quite often, holding his tongue; he (i.e., the characters Nelson has written for him) has something to say, but has learned not to say it. As for Plunkett, she demonstrates again and again that she is one of our finest dramatic performers. (I can’t help but recall seeing her in me mind’s eye as a slip o’ a Cockney, doin’ the “Lambeth Walk” and winning a Tony in the 1986 Me and My Girl; but by now that seems like it was probably a different Maryann Plunkett.)
Nelson explains that Conversations During Difficult Times is the first of two Michaels Family plays, the final installments of what at this point he intends to be a nine-play “Rhinebeck Panorama.” All are written to be performed separately and stand on their own, and they do; all of the plays were produced individually, at the Public, although at the end of the run of the final Apple play, the other three were remounted and played together as marathons. Both the Apples and Gabriels have done limited international tours including all the plays, mostly with the original casts.
Perhaps that will, indeed, be the end of Rhinebeck on Lafayette Street. In any event, Nelson has presented us with evening after evening after evening of fine, intriguing, and engrossing drama. The Michaels join the Apples and the Gabriels, and playgoers are urged to take a seat around the table while seats are still available.
The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times opened Oct. 27, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through Nov. 24. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
