Cider is on the table, fresh bread is in the oven and a head of cauliflower is being cut and seasoned for a spicy lasagna dish. For those of us who have followed Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama—a series of twelve plays tracking three families based in that Hudson Valley town, each set on its opening date—it’s a homecoming of sorts, albeit a bittersweet one. And that’s not just because What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad is intended as the final installment.
One reason is as obvious as the masked noses on the faces of theatergoers who have seen or will attend performances of What Happened?, after filling out forms to certify they have been vaccinated against COVID. Nelson has, not surprisingly, been extremely prolific over the pandemic; in April 2020, the playwright and director unveiled the first in a since-completed trilogy featuring original cast members of his Apple Family plays corresponding on Zoom. These latest plays, like others in the Panorama, provided comfort as they provoked thought, raising tough questions—about relationships and mortality, politics and world events—with a naturalism that could be as searing as it was nurturing.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
In What Happened?, we once again share a physical space with one of Nelson’s families—this time the Michaels, the focus of a two-part series introduced with an eponymous play that opened October 27, 2019—and their friends. As always, the setting is disarmingly intimate; wood and vegetables are prominent in Jason Ardizzone-West’s cozy set, and you can smell that bread and lasagna baking even through an N95 mask. But we’re actually not in Rhinebeck anymore: Arts manager David Michael and his second wife, Sally, a former dancer, have traveled to Angers, France to attend a student dance festival in which Lucy, David’s daughter by his first wife, is performing.
Rose Michael, Lucy’s mother and a celebrated modern dancer and choreographer, loomed large in the ensemble of The Michaels, and her presence is arguably even greater here, though the character never appears on stage. The first play unfolded not long after Rose had been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, but her fate, it is gradually revealed, has not been as simple as merely succumbing to that disease. A pronounced sense of irony, sometimes bitter and very timely, wafts through the aromatic kitchen belonging to Suzanne Raphael—a former dancer in Rose’s company (like Sally) who has been hosting Lucy through a local residency that has stretched from six months to nearly two years, presumably at least in part because of the pandemic.
COVID has to some extent upended all of their lives, naturally. Irenie Walker, a visitor from New York who also danced in Rose’s company, relays a friend’s summation: “Everyone is now rethinking everything.” Irenie, who is sixty and single, has been spending a lot of time with her dog, and her thoughts. Suzanne has lost the needy elder brother who dominated her life for decades—yet another mentee of Rose, and now an instructor at the school where Lucy is a resident—to a wife. Both have seen friends and colleagues die, as have David and Sally, who like the others, and so many in the arts community, have faced increasing financial insecurity with the shuttering and re-shuttering of performance spaces. As dinner is prepared, David mentions an offer from another friend to join him in running what’s essentially a rock concert venue, in Utica. The city, Sally notes, “has attracted refugees from wars all over the world.”
There is an underappreciated courage in Nelson’s attention to the very real problems of people whose privilege has been emphasized more and more in recent years. Without pedantry or pretense, What Happened? shines a fierce light on COVID’s devastating impact not just on artists, but on the vast majority of individuals who, whatever their backgrounds, were not thriving to begin with under the grossly deformed model of capitalism that has overtaken the American economy. The playwright acknowledges complexities in the rightful pursuit of social justice; the friend who wants to partner with David, we learn, apparently resigned from a top position at a theater after being accused of racism. David recounts a conversation with him: “He said to me, after a few drinks, ‘David, I really don’t think my theater’s a ‘white theater.’ I have never seen it that way. Maybe I’m wrong…Am I wrong?’ I didn’t know what to say to that. I don’t know.”
But Nelson’s play is at its most potent when addressing even more complicated and primal matters. Rose’s relationships with Lucy and with Kate Harris, a history teacher who became her lover and wife—played with radiant decency by the great Maryann Plunkett, who with husband Jay O. Sanders, cast as David, has anchored the Rhinebeck Panorama throughout—are often in focus during these moments. As with The Michaels, there is an enchanting, funny, poignant dance sequence, performed by Charlotte Bydwell as Lucy and Matilda Sakamoto as her cousin May; Lucy, wearing a dress that was frequently Rose’s costume, is torn between rejecting the influence of her demanding, domineering mother and embracing it. When David refers to Rose, Lucy can become defiant, but then she will run up to touch her father and smile at him, as if channeling Rose’s spirit. Sanders and Bydwell are wonderfully moving, as are all the actors, who also include Haviland Morris, Rita Wolf, and Yvonne Woods.
Towards the end, Kate recalls how Rose once mistakenly referred to her by a previous lover’s name. “Once she said to me, ‘Alice, life doesn’t last. Art doesn’t last. And it doesn’t matter…’ When she said this, I thought she was being bitter…Angry. But I had misunderstood. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It’s that it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t last.” Such simple profundities endure, though—leaving one to hope Nelson will realize it’s not too late to start another family, or at least remain as productive as he’s been.
What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad opened September 8, 2021, at the Frederick Loewe Theatre and runs through October 8. Tickets and information: huntertheaterproject.org
