Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered the New York theater scene in the middle of March, numerous companies and artists have delivered programming on YouTube either as previously recorded content or as livestream events.
Last night, the Public Theater premiered a livestreamed work written specifically for a YouTube format by Richard Nelson. What Do We Need to Talk About? Conversations on Zoom is Nelson’s fifth and latest episode in the lives of his fictional Apple family.
During the last decade, the playwright has composed a number of full-length realistic dramas in his ongoing Rhinebeck Panorama, which studies several families living in the Hudson River town of Rhinebeck, New York, in these latter times. (The Gabriel and Michael households are other residents of the plays in the later years of this cycle.)
[Read Elysa Gardner’s review here.]
The Public Theater has presented the plays—usually with the same fine actors in beautiful ensemble performances—with considerable artistic success.
The initial group in the series, the Apple Family Plays involve four dramas. That Hopey Changey Thing (2010) is set during the 2010 midterm elections. Sweet and Sad (2011) mentions the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Sorry (2012) unfolds on Election Day in 2012. Regular Singing (2013) briefly recalls the assassination of John F. Kennedy some fifty years earlier.
Each play sees its six characters gather to share a meal. The intimate plays naturally happen in real time in a dining room as these nice, educated, liberal, articulate, white people chat and chew over their joined lives and the current events of the moment in Rhinebeck and the world.
The main characters are four siblings now in their later middle age. Barbara and Marian are schoolteachers. The youngest, Jane, is a freelance writer. Their brother Richard is an attorney who has made big bucks in the corporate world but has returned to Albany to work in state government. Their beloved uncle, Benjamin, is a formerly notable actor sidelined by memory loss. Tim is another actor, younger and scarcely so eminent, who is Jane’s boyfriend.
Written by Nelson not as a stage play but rather as a 60-minute laptop drama, What Do We Need to Talk About? depicts these people—sequestered in various locations in the ongoing pandemic—conversing with each other during a Zoom video conference on an April evening.
Seemingly eavesdropping on the family’s chat, the viewer sees four panels on the video screen.
Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) temporarily shares her home with Richard (Jay O. Sanders). Marian (Laila Robins) is in her own place. Jane (Sally Murphy) and Tim (Stephen Kunken) speak from different parts of their house because he is self-quarantined with a fever in the spare bedroom. Uncle Benjamin (Jon DeVries), died several years previously, but is heard on a recording as he recites a Walt Whitman poem.
And so the Apples, as is their custom, talk about their ongoing lives. Much of their fond conversations will utterly mystify strangers to Nelson’s loquacious, loving family.
Fortunately, the earlier Apple plays are currently being livestreamed on local Channel 13, and newbies are advised to check out one or more of them to better comprehend, let alone appreciate, What Do We Need to Talk About?
Longtime friends of the family will be charmed, as usual, by the thoughtful give and take that goes on between these three earnest women and their amiable, conflicted brother. Let’s not spill any beans on their doings except to mention that Barbara has just returned home from five days in the hospital, where she expected to die from the disease of the moment.
Like the previous plays, this one deals in timely issues and the talk is peppered with references to Andrew Cuomo and other worthies.
Scarcely a standalone drama that can be performed in the future as a play on the stage, What Do We Need to Talk About? remains faithful to the earlier works in both style and its contents. Akin to the others, which were originally performed in a relatively small 275-seat space at the Public, this work offers a genuine, though different, sense of intimacy as viewers observe the family’s video chat on their own screens at home.
Although the drama is static, other than occasional moments when characters get up to grab a glass of wine, the up close and personal nature of Nelson’s storytelling maintains attention.
No credit for designers is cited in the proficient livestream production directed by Nelson (who has staged all of the Apple premieres), but the cozy environs of the four rooms depicted here reflect the characters nicely enough. Similarly, their clothes look mostly appropriate; if Richard is not wearing one of his customary flannel shirts, at least Barbara typically wears a comfy cardigan.
It is obvious that the smoothly produced and well-paced piece has been rehearsed with care by Nelson and his actors who already own their characters through their performances in the earlier plays. Sensitively scaled down to human authenticity to suit the online medium, the performances are very real and very lovely.
What Do We Need to Talk About? provides a screenshot record of our troubled American times that is certain to touch people who already know the Apple family and is likely to make new friends of anyone who meets them only now.
