The Apple family of Rhinebeck have since 2010 been negotiating their way through minefields economical, political, filial, physical, emotional, and terminal. In our seventh visit with Richard Nelson’s clan of close-knit but disparate siblings—four full-length plays presented at the Public and internationally, plus three Zoom sessions over the past months—the first sense we get from our screens is one of resigned disintegration.
Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) has looked increasingly frazzled over the last plays; Jane (Sally Murphy) has become increasingly unsettled; and Jane’s long-time boyfriend, Tim (Stephen Kunken), looks drawn, troubled, and worn out. Richard (Jay O. Sanders), when he makes his belated entrance, stares unsteadily at the computer screen. One wonders, as this Zoom play begins, whether this is perhaps what a band of expert character actors has come to over the course of our present long and nowhere-near-ending isolation.
But no. The disintegration we see, and which reflects the isolation that many of us might well share—living life in our separate screens, as it were—is Nelson’s point. These visual undercurrents of despair turn out to be directly related to the slings and arrows the various Apples are presently coping with. Director Nelson and his actors emanate varied but distinct shades of despair before they even begin to converse. As they proceed in their roundabout manner, peppered with family anecdotes and retold jokes which never come out quite as intended, we sense that the four of them are each staring into their own separate precipice.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
The characters are not even geographically together. Jane and Marian (Laila Robins, who appears so briefly that one expects she was unavailable to participate in rehearsals of this play) are in their separate abodes in Rhinebeck; Barbara and Richard are in Albany, where the latter has just (finally!) resigned from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s staff and is packing up his apartment. Tim—who after all these years and all these plays finally seems, to me at least, to be not an outsider but a full member of the family—is in the college town of Amherst, Mass., bunkering in his childhood bedroom.
The stated purpose of the evening’s gathering is to watch a piece of performance art by Lucy Michael (Charlotte Bydwell). Young choreographer Lucy, a former student of Barbara’s, was a central character in The Michaels, one of the non-Apple plays in Nelson’s Rhinebeck cycle. Her rendition here of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”—a Chaplin-esque, three-minute interlude choreographed by Dan Wagoner—is streamed in from Angers, France, where Lucy is stranded.
Incidental Moments of the Day—the title borrowed from a 2019 Tate Modern exhibition of the work of Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947)—is seemingly the final Apple play. Or is it? We are told that it is “the third and final play of a ‘pandemic trilogy’ of Apple Family plays on Zoom.” Which doesn’t mean that we won’t necessarily get to meet with the Apples once more down at the Public. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
It goes without saying that the cast—Plunkett, Sanders, Murphy, and Kunken are prominent in this installment—are beyond superb, so I won’t say it. Let me add that I am especially grateful to the author that he hasn’t devised this play to open on Election Night. He did that four years ago, and it didn’t work out so well.
At curtain’s fall—or rather, just before our screens go blank—we are left with two of the three sisters, both suffering from lonely despair of what is to come.
“You going to be all right? Jane asks.
“Are you?” Barbara responds.
Jane terminates her connection. Barbara, who has been at the center of all the Apple plays, is left sharing her Zoom connection not with her siblings but with we, the audience. Whom by this point might be considered the Apple family’s extended family.
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
