Playwright and director Richard Nelson completes what he calls his Rhinebeck Panorama—encompassing nine full plays plus last summer’s Pandemic Trilogy of Zoom plays—with What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad. Each thematically related but distinct installment, about three different if slightly overlapping families in this bucolic but gentrifying Hudson River town, have been strong, provocative, and delectable. What Happened—which takes one of the clans to the similarly out-of-the-way city of Angers, France—might be the most powerful of them all. Perhaps because in Nelson’s plays, all of which are centered around food, the last course served is always the tastiest.
Since the first play opened in 2010, Nelson’s families (the Apples, the Gabriels, and the Michaels) have been living under constant dread of despair, decay, and imminent catastrophe. And haven’t we all? One of the plays, Women of a Certain Age, took place on the night of the 2016 election. We all know how that turned out; but the characters, sitting in their kitchen, couldn’t likely foresee the extent of the disaster that lay directly ahead.
When we last saw the Michaels, in October 2019, the action centered around Rose, a modern choreographer who was in the final stages of ovarian cancer. As we rejoin the group today, the remnants of the family are indeed abroad; exiled, in more ways than one, from their ancestral homeland of Rhinebeck. Dancer-choreographer-daughter Lucy’s six-month residency in France is approaching the two-year mark (there’s a pandemic going on), and the group has congregated to attend her much-delayed dance festival. The characters, as before, ruminate on their interrelated past and stare the ominous future in the face. But the storm-clouds have already burst upon the Michaels, and don’t think that Nelson isn’t speaking of the rest of us as well.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★★ review here.]
The author has developed an impressive stock company of actors over his panorama. We need not mention, I suppose, the presence of Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders, who have inhabited members of each family and provided the foundation upon which Nelson has built his monumental edifice. But we must. Plunkett, who in her long career has mostly avoided the spotlight, is among the finest performers on our stage. As Kate, a schoolteacher (that is, an outsider) who has married into the Michaels’ world of modern dance and theater, she is superb. Nelson, in a program note, indicates his desire that the actors create “rich, complicated, complex, confused, doubting, lost, hopeful, despairing, questioning people.” Which serves as an explicit description of what Plunkett has done in all the Rhinebeck plays—but with no evidence, anywhere at any time, of “acting.”
Sanders, meanwhile, has served as the charmingly blustery and generally overlooked male figure in all the plays. (In fact, he has been the only male character in the five Gabriel and Michaels plays.) Nelson has drawn these characters with a humorously deprecating, and perhaps self-deprecating, hand, which Sanders perfectly captures.
The other actors, all but one of whom are carried over from The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times, more than earn their place as members of Nelson’s extraordinary troupe. Charlotte Bydwell (as Lucy) and Matilda Sakamoto (as the niece, May) were admirable in the earlier play, although at times coming across as talented dancers who sometimes act. Here, they demonstrate full skill sets. This only enhances the power of their dance sequences, reconstructed by Gwyneth Jones from the work (circa 1980) of choreographer Dan Wagoner. (“South Rampart Street” and “Cocktails for Two” are especially pulse-raising.) Rita Wolf and Haviland Morris return as former members of the Michaels dance company, with newcomer-to-the-series Yvonne Woods giving a similarly adept performance as the ex-dancer who hosts the group in Angers.
In keeping with the kitchen-table milieu of the collective plays, Nelson has his actors prepare, cook, and consume dinner over the course of the action, complete with savory aromas as the food comes out of the oven. (Depending upon where you’re sitting, you might see steam rise out of the perfectly formed boule with which, at the beginning of the action, they literally break bread.) As mouth-watering as the meal appears to the audience, the actors might not exactly appreciate that Nelson’s plotting demands that they devour plates of lasagna at each performance. The two young dancers have dramaturgical reason to skip the meal, and it’s no wonder.
As with the other installments in the series, What Happened will likely be widely produced (once live theater is, again, widely produced) and preserved for broadcast. Even so, the experience—of seeing the play among a mere 74 patrons sitting around the kitchen table, with the modern dance sections pretty much spilling into your lap, and above all with the mastery of Plunkett and Sanders within reach—exemplifies what it is we seek from live theater. And in keeping with the plays-for-the-people mission of producer Gregory Mosher and his Hunter Theater Project, the seats are priced at $39.50 and half that for students. So give yourself a treat, if you can, and head up to 68th Street (with the Lexington Avenue subway, literally, on the corner).
What Happened ends—as most of the Rhinebeck Panorama has—with Plunkett alone, wearily surveying the field of battle. Which in the world Nelson has created, is the homey, hopey-changey kitchen. Over these eleven years, Nelson has been crystalizing for audiences (or at least, his audiences) where we are now. Let us entreat the playwright to continue to do so, showing us where we are tomorrow.
What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad opened September 8, 2021, at the Frederick Loewe Theatre and runs through October 8. Tickets and information: huntertheaterproject.org
