Live theater is a communal experience by nature, which is why its absence seems especially poignant now, as the COVID-19 crisis has shut us off from the comfort of friends and strangers alike. But in the string of plays that make up Richard Nelson’s Rhineback Panorama—launched a decade ago with the four Apple Family Plays, followed by the trilogy The Gabriels and the one-off (as of yet) The Michaels—the bond between audience and performers is particularly intimate and powerful.
Staged at the Public Theater, under Nelson’s direction, the plays in the Panorama follow families confronting current events and each other more or less in real time—pauses suggest occasional gaps—with each play set on the date of the production’s opening night: Two of the Apple plays unfold on Election Day, in 2010 and 2012, while the others take place on anniversaries of national tragedies, Sept. 11 and JFK’s assassination. Installments of The Gabriels premiered months apart in 2016, with the final play opening on a certain fateful, ultimately tragic night in November.
[Read Michael Sommers’ review here.]
With viewers seated in close proximity to stages designed as the families’ kitchens, there were no decimations of the fourth wall, no interactive or immersive shenanigans—unless you counted the delicious aromas of live cooking in The Gabriels; only Nelson’s witty but utterly naturalistic dialogue, and performances of expert, unflinching authenticity—by ensembles that included the duly treasured (and married) veterans Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders—were necessary to suck us headfirst, with hearts aligned, into their lives.
So I’ll wager I’m one of many theater fans for whom the Public’s livestreamed world premiere of a new Apple play, What Do We Need To Talk About? Conversations on Zoom—broadcast on YouTube Live Wednesday evening— felt like one of the check-ins with old friends that have helped sustain our sanity during these weeks of isolation. No matter that we’re not technically involved in the exchange in Conversations; as usual, we feel a part of it. And if anything this 60-minute work, which brings back five of Apple Family’s six original characters, all played by the actors who portrayed them at the Public, makes an even more potent case for the necessity of human connection.
Much of that has to do with timing, and the irony implicit in producing live theater virtually. For Nelson’s literate, middle-class characters, who are now all well into the AARP demographic, Zoom may not be a natural forum. But popping up on four screens Wednesday, from simulated locations in Rhinebeck, they were clearly as happy, and relieved, to see each other as fans were to see them. (Those who haven’t encountered the Apples yet are heartily encouraged to stream the earlier plays, also available for a limited time via the links listed below, before catching Conversations.) There was Plunkett’s Barbara, the devoted high-school English teacher and selfless nurturer of her three siblings, back from the hospital after doing serious battle with the coronavirus, accompanied in her living room by Sanders’s Richard, the attorney, in from Albany, where he returned after divorcing his wife and ditching corporate law to once again work for the state, under Governor Andrew Cuomo.
The younger Marian, an elementary school teacher who during the original cycle lost her daughter to suicide and her ex-husband to cancer, appeared from her living room, her brittle elegance and broken heart kept beautifully intact by Laila Robins. Baby sister Jane, played by the marvelous Sally Murphy with her usual winsomeness and a wistful longing spiked by girlish vitality, and her mensch of a boyfriend, Tim—the youngest of the bunch, in his early 50s, and still irresistibly decent in Stephen Kunken’s smart, nuanced portrayal—checked in from separate rooms in their home, as Tim is suffering from milder symptoms of COVID.
The tone is at first breezy, albeit with nods to Barbara’s health scare (Plunkett, her hair darkened, looked suitably pale and frail) and notes of the shellshock we’ve all endured over the past couple of months. Tim, an actor who has been making a living managing a local restaurant, is now facing economic insecurity, a recurring theme in the Apple plays; he quips that another local eatery has been giving out toilet paper with delivery orders. He and the Apples eat and drink as they talk, and talk of food and drink—drawing us in, as always, through such familiar, pleasurable rituals. They tease Barbara for her solicitousness and reluctance to be cared for, and later indulge Jane as she bubbles forth about her latest book-in-progress—leading them down the artistic and historical rabbit holes that are also delightful hallmarks of the plays, with Bach, Walt Whitman, and Franklin Pierce returning in cameo references.
Some may complain, as some have in the past, that these educated, articulate East Coasters represent too conveniently familiar a milieu. But I’d argue that Nelson refuses to cater to the perceived choir comprised by Manhattan audiences: Not only have his upstate residents ridiculed the entitled one-percenters who keep summer homes in their town—there’s a wry reference in Conversations to the sudden invasion of city-dwellers fleeing the pandemic—but he’s one of the few playwrights regularly produced in New York who acknowledges corruption, hypocrisy and inefficiency on both sides of our two-party system. And he does so without didacticism, treating the different perspectives of his characters with equal respect.
In earlier Apple Family plays, Richard and other characters expressed skepticism about cherished Democratic politicians, right up to President Obama. One of the funnier recurring jokes in the series concerns Cuomo, hardly a progressive and not a consistent darling of the left, whom Richard has blasted in the past for his ruthless tactics. “There’s a good side to him,” Tim wisecracks in Conversations. “Who knew?” Richard responds, “I’ve Skyped with a few guys in the office. Their wives are saying—’what have you been complaining about all these years?’ ‘You come home crying…’…Some things you can’t explain.”
But Conversations serves up less political debate than its predecessors. Our current president, whom Nelson seemed loath to mention even in The Gabriels plays and The Michaels, produced when he was a candidate and in office, gets only an anonymous, shuddering nod—when Richard notes that Pierce wasn’t re-elected after his disastrous term, and Marian quips, “We can hope and pray. Fingers crossed.”
The new play’s scope and concerns are more consistently personal, with the universal themes that have coursed through his Panorama—love and loss, family, mortality—thrown into even starker relief. The power of telling stories—of sharing them, more specifically—is emphasized as the Apples encourage each other to do so. Barbara, predictably, thinks first of another family member, their Uncle Benjamin, whose struggles with dementia were wrenchingly relayed by Jon DeVries in the earlier plays. Benjamin has since died, but Barbara plays a recording of DeVries in the role, reciting Whitman’s poem “The Wound Dresser,” in the second Apple play, Sweet and Sad.
Listening to their lost relative’s voice mostly in silence, interjecting only with flashes of recognition—”I can see him, Jane,” Richard murmurs at one point—the Apples capture how time can sting us, even when it seems to stand still. Like all the plays in this series, though, Conversations also acknowledges and celebrates resilience. I’m hoping to see Nelson’s characters, and these actors, again soon—hopefully in the flesh next time.
