The fictional Apple family has been tenderly depicted by Richard Nelson in five previous works. These contemporary figures are white Americans of the Baby Boom generation and they are nice, thoughtful, professional people who reside in the Hudson River town of Rhinebeck, New York.
Intimate and familiar in their conversational style, the dramas share a sameness in that each one simply sees the family sharing a meal and discussing current events of the day in the context of their lives. The plays unfold in real time. The emotions that arise in these conversations are usually muted but touchingly human.
Making the series and its characters seemingly even more confidential, at least to off-Broadway audiences, nearly all of the same excellent actors have portrayed these individuals in natural performances as the plays have premiered separately at the Public Theater over the last ten years.
[Read David Finkle’s review here.]
The latest work in this series written and directed by Nelson, And So We Come Forth, which is subtitled The Apple Family: A Dinner on Zoom, premiered Wednesday as a livestreamed event on YouTube. Like its immediate predecessor, What Do We Need to Talk About?, which was livestreamed in April, And So We Come Forth finds the family members currently in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Richard (Jay O. Sanders), an Albany attorney on the verge of retirement, is sharing the home of his sister Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), a high school teacher. Their younger siblings Marian (Laila Robins), another teacher, and Jane (Sally Murphy), a freelance magazine writer, join them in a virtual chat and chew from their separate domiciles. Meanwhile, Jane’s longtime partner Tim (Stephen Kunken), a part-time actor who managed a Rhinebeck restaurant, occupies a fourth Zoom panel from Brooklyn, where he has been visiting his daughter at the home of his former wife.
The notion of these family members sharing their experiences in a virtual conversation likely strikes a chord with viewers, who probably have had similar sessions with their own friends and relations. Although the action is relatively static as the characters remain confined inside their video panels, the intimate nature of the 70-minute presentation is evident.
The significant problem with And So We Come Forth is the dawning realization that these people don’t have anything particularly compelling or provocative to say and, further, how there is little conflict in their quasi-liberal views about these terribly “interesting times” in which everybody lives today.
The social protest, civil unrest, economic nightmare, general government failure, widespread pandemic and death, and similar serious issues that currently convulse our country are, at best, only indirectly addressed by the characters.
Richard is thinking about writing a book about Rhinebeck. Marian busies herself in her garden. Barbara feels hurt that her former students are not interested any longer in her opinions. Jane and Tim are anxious about his 18 year-old daughter who may unwillingly come to live with them later this summer.
The mundane nature of the desultory conversations that ensue grow even duller when the characters begin to talk at length about the problems of their adult children, none of whom the audience has ever met in the earlier plays. Worse, nobody here gets particularly upset or angry; the prevailing emotion seems to be a sort of exhausted resignation.
Those of us who feel like friends of the Apple family, having invested our time and emotions in their previous iterations, may tolerate the extremely subdued play’s intermittent tedium, but viewers new to the Apples are unlikely to be so forgiving.
The uncredited design for the production is quiet and appropriate. The acting by artists who wear their characters as second natures by now, of course, is lovely.
But when his characters have too little to say of interest, perhaps it’s time for the playwright to give them a rest.
