As its live performance began last night, some 325 individuals were waiting to view the first stream of Incidental Moments of the Day: The Apple Family: Life on Zoom, playwright-director Richard Nelson’s final work in his new trilogy regarding the contemporary Apple family of Rhinebeck, New York.
That number of spectators is a tad larger than the audiences seated at one performance among the Public Theater’s several spaces, where Nelson staged his original series of Apple plays during the 2010-2013 seasons.
Nelson’s two latest works involving the Apple characters, created for internet audiences and composed specifically within a Zoom format, What Do We Need to Talk About? and And So We Come Forth, are said to have scored nearly 100,000 views since the former play premiered in April.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Here, the relative intimacy of watching a show happen in an Off Broadway house is replaced by the relative intimacy of looking closer at the characters/actors from a laptop screen at home.
Evidently a swift writer, Nelson has brought back his fondly regarded Apple characters to chat about their socially distanced lives during these pandemic times in suppertime Zoom sessions shared from their various isolated abodes. Each of the three works runs about 70-75 minutes in real time.
The playwright crafts these family conversations within a Zoom situation that many a viewer certainly can appreciate, complete with its unflattering camera angles and awkward conversational overlaps and silences.
Friends of the family—certainly I am one—require no introduction to them, but for the record, the Apples are a nice, white, professional, Boomer generation of siblings, namely Richard (Jay O. Sanders), a now-retired lawyer; his sisters, Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) and Marian (Laila Robins), both public school teachers; and the youngest, Jane (Sally Murphy), a freelance writer. There also is Tim (Stephen Kunken), Jane’s longtime beau, an unlucky actor now unwillingly become a bartender.
So, what’s going on with them this time? Not much, really, although they are depicted as striving to get along with their lives in spite of social distancing and other Covid-19 restrictions. Like And So We Come Forth, this latest work lacks dramatic conflict between the characters as they occasionally express their mutual quasi-liberal thoughts regarding 2020 events.
Incidental Moments of the Day is another subtle, markedly quiet piece. None of the characters denounces the failure of the federal government in dealing with the pandemic (although Richard remains sarcastic about Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his former boss) or discuss other hot topics at length. At one point, however, they uneasily mention their anxiety about being mistakenly labeled as racists for questioning anything about the Black Lives Matter movement.
There are passing references to wearing masks, about a well-meaning play production cancelled by public misperception, and other occasional instances of upper-middle-class existence today.
Not incidentally, nobody here appears to be short of money. But everybody seems to be low in spirits, especially Jane, who admits to depression and whose relationship with Tim looks shaky.
References to and readings from The Cherry Orchard, The Suicide, and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, among other texts, underscore the playwright’s message that life is complicated.
Often the siblings talk about unseen others, including their beloved deceased uncle. It is revealed that Richard has a girlfriend, Yvonne, about whom his sisters only recently have learned. Tim now has custody of his teen daughter Karen, and along with her best friend, Maggie, they are residing in his boyhood home in Amherst, Mass. Tim’s ailing mom, residing in an assisted living facility, also is mentioned, as well as a Rhinebeck neighbor who recently died.
The references to these and other people who do not actually appear in the play may intrigue viewers who already have invested themselves fondly in the Apples’ affairs but will scarcely interest strangers to the family.
Somebody new who pops up in a Zoom panel from France is Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell), a former student of Barbara’s who is a professional dancer. Lucy proceeds to perform a witty, lyrical interpretation of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag to everyone’s enjoyment. Let’s not explain the whys for this nice interlude but simply say that it leavens the mundane nature of the drama and bespeaks Nelson’s point that people should seek out unexpected beauty in their everyday lives.
Speaking of beauty, the seemingly spontaneous performances of the ensemble remain lovely in their extremely natural qualities, although the velvet-voiced Robins is glimpsed for scarcely two minutes as melancholy Marian. Among these fine portrayals, Plunkett offers several especially darling moments as her Barbara badly tells a mildly naughty joke about a damsel with a glass eye.
Although the production successfully strives to appear totally artless, a more considered design in terms of backgrounds and clothes would enhance the piece. The lighting looks especially harsh on the actors.
Several characters express feelings that their horizons and futures have been diminished by the troubles plaguing our current times. Many of us certainly can relate to these fears even as the worthy, though intermittently tedious, Incidental Moments of the Day seems somewhat too incidental for its own good.
Incidental Moments of the Day : The Apple Family, Life on Zoom was livestreamed September 10, 2020, and will remain online through November 5. Information and streaming: theapplefamilyplays.com
