In 2023, while accepting his Obie Award for the completion of The Rhinebeck Panorama, writer-director Richard Nelson reflected on the plays’ start. “We began the project … 14 years ago with a play that at the time I called ‘disposable,’ and it just grew and grew into the 12-play series and a cycle spanning a decade of American life in real time as seen from the dining rooms and kitchens of families in Rhinebeck, New York, my home.”
We now know two things: The first play, That Hopey Changey Thing, set on the night of the 2010 midterm elections, was by no means “disposable.” And the Obie committee (full disclosure: I was a co-chair) jumped the gun with that “completion” thing. Even after a dozen plays about three Rhinebeck families — the Apples, the Gabriels, and the Michaels — Nelson has more tales to tell: The beautifully naturalistic We’ll See: Conversations Among the Apple Family on the Night of the Midterm Elections, just opened at the Public’s Barbaralee Theater, brings the Apples around the dinner table once again; happily, our affection for them, and the incomparable cast, has not waned.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Some of us have known the Apples for 16 years. With each play, we made a habit of joining them on momentous evenings: in 2010, when Republicans won 63 seats and control of the House (That Hopey Changey Thing); in 2011, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 (Sweet and Sad); the night of the 2012 presidential election (Sorry); and in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination (Regular Singing). In 2020, during lockdown, we met them on three separate occasions — What Do We Need to Talk About?, And So We Come Forth, and Incidental Moments of the Day — via Zoom. The Apples were recovering from Covid-19, anxious and lonely, and panicked about the impending presidential election just like the rest of us.
Reuniting with siblings Richard (Jay O. Sanders), Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), Marian (Laila Robins), and Jane (Sally Murphy) on this week’s midterm election night is a much-needed emotional salve. The mundanities of their usual routine — making dinner, casually quoting classic literature such as Middlemarch and the poetry of Walt Whitman, harmonizing on a 19th-century Irish folk song — save us (well, me) from a descent into midterm madness: doom-scrolling; angst-watching MS NOW; and reading blood pressure–raising op-eds, such as the one by Ken Burns in The New York Times calling these midterms “our country’s fourth great crisis”—the other three being the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. Plus, since we’re at the theater, our phones are off, so we can’t see the home-screen widget auto-updating with the Democrat-Republican Senate count. (Who asked for that? I didn’t ask for that.)
Thankfully, the sisters have banned all mention of “his” name tonight, a rule more of us should put in place at our family dinners. But that doesn’t mean there’s no talk of politics. High school English teacher Barbara, who’s been unceremoniously pushed into retirement, has heard “really ugly things” in conversations among her students. “We know where all this comes from. Who it comes from. Who’s set the tone,” she says. “I don’t think we know yet the full extent of the damage he’s causing,” adds Richard. Confessing she didn’t vote, Jane — who’s feeling a bit unmoored, bouncing between Rhinebeck and New York City with her actor boyfriend, Tim (unseen but much-mentioned in We’ll See) — laments the politicalization of their “beautiful, historic, confused, frustrated, and very human town.… Why have we started to hate? What have we become?” Later, Richard recalls a text exchange with his daughter, who describes her emotional state as “a general dread, an ominous dread. For her it now feels like she’s ‘trying to resist the total collapse of hope.’”
It takes a non-relative, Richard’s actress girlfriend, Yvonne (Yvonne Woods) — who, incidentally, worked with the siblings’ Uncle Benjamin, a key figure in the Apple 2010–2013 tetralogy — to put the audience’s feelings into words: “In tough times, a theater feels like the healthiest place to be.” Yvonne is talking about recapturing some sense of normalcy while returning to work after her cancer treatment. Truthfully, she’s all of us — clinging to Nelson’s words for comfort, wrapping ourselves in the warmth of our Apple extended family. “In a room full of people, all listening — you are allowed to let yourself forget. And that helps you survive.”
We’ll See opened Nov. 3, 2026, at the Public Theater and runs through Nov. 29. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
