It’s nice to be back in Rhinebeck.
I refer not to the real Hudson Valley village, but to playwright Richard Nelson’s version of it, displayed periodically over the past several years on the stages of the Public Theater.
Nelson’s latest is The Michaels, which opened last night, and, like its predecessors The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels, it takes us inside a sprawling, complicated, solidly middle-class family and friends living in the parts of that leafy upstate town that feel besieged, if just a bit, by wealthy city people with weekend homes. The fading patriarch of the Apples was an actor; the Gabriels were gathering because they’d recently lost a playwright son, brother, and husband; in The Michaels, we’re confronted with a materfamilias choreographer, recently diagnosed with terminal illness.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Rose Michael is her name, and the play transpires in her kitchen. The Apple plays were staged in the Public’s Anspacher Theater, with its thrust stage and stadium seating; now we’re in the smaller and more protean LuEsther Hall, configured in the round. The effect is to put the audience almost inside that kitchen, which the actors assemble from stacked furniture at the start of the intermissionless show; it is to make us part of the family. That feels right, because this play, directed by the playwright, is about how human beings interact with each other.
I was moved by the Apple series and missed The Gabriels (though I read about it). The Michaels seems to be the least political of these works — “The Rhinebeck Panorama,” the Public calls the combined series — and the first to be set on a random Sunday (last night, in fact) rather than on a historically significant date like an election night. They’re all about the vagaries of every day life, as people trying to do the right thing confront a world changing around them. All three families were artistic, but The Michaels is the one to deal most explicitly with the making of art.
Rose (Brenda Wehle) was a titan of the downtown dance scene, it seems, the visionary behind a small but influential troupe. She lives now upstate, next door to David (Jay O. Sanders), her ex-husband and co-company founder, who is now married to Sally (Rita Wolf), a former dancer in the company. Rose was for many years involved with Alice; she has lately started a relationship with Kate (Maryann Plunkett), a retired local history teacher. Rose and David’s daughter, Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell), is visiting from the city; she is also a dancer and choreographer, and she had Kate as a teacher. May (Matilda Sakamoto), Rose’s niece and also a dancer, is visiting, too; so is Irenie (Haviland Morris), an old friend and former company dancer.
It is one of the play’s many charms that the unusual family arrangements go essentially unremarked upon. That is, of course, how life works among well-intentioned people; things are what they are, and you accommodate yourself to them. The larger questions here are how the domineering and somewhat withholding Rose will accommodate to her diagnosis and decline, how and why Kate chooses to get involved with someone just beginning what will be a precipitous decline, and how Rose’s legacy, and her dances, will live on. In fact, it’s a particular stroke of Nelson’s genius to make the center of this play a choreographer. It’s a work about time passing, about things passing, about remembering what came before — and is there anything so ephemeral as the steps to a movement long ago last danced?
Sanders and Plunkett, as David and Kate, are typically excellent, as they’ve been in the rest of this Panorama. They’re grounded, grounding actors; they bring Nelson’s naturalism alive and make you want to spend time with them. Wehle, as Rose, is particularly strong as the diminished woman who is still the center of the group; she is both commanding and, occasionally, vulnerable. Nelson’s direction is as well-worn and comfortable as the flannels his cast wears (costume design is by Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss), although the conversationally overlapping dialogue, combined with the in-the-round stage that leaves actors only occasionally projecting toward any particular portion of the audience, leaves some lines difficult to decipher.
Unexpectedly for this pleasantly talky play, it is movement that makes things come most alive. There are three dances in the evening; one by Lucy, one by Meg, one a duet, all, we’re told, old dances of Rose that Lucy has been working to recreate. (The dances are based on original choreography by Dan Wagoner, the Playbill says, with Gwyneth Jones as choreography consultant.) Bydwell is both an actor and a dancer, and she does a fine job as Lucy; Sakamoto, as May, is a well-trained dancer, and her solo recreation, danced, like the others, around the kitchen table, is the evening’s high point. You see how Rose’s dances were different, witty, and beautiful. In Sakamoto’s performance, you see the joy they brought to those who saw them—and those who danced them. You feel viscerally the power of Rose’s work and the central place it has held in all these characters’ lives. You see how it holds them together.
And that’s the point. The Michaels is a quiet play, about holding it together. About decent people trying to do the right thing for the decent people around them. Today, that, too, can be a political stance.
The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times opened October 27, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through November 24. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
