The Apple family is back again, on another Zoom call. After the triumphant return in April of writer and director Richard Nelson’s Apple Family series with What Do We Need To Talk About, which seemed perfectly timed — the right play at the right time – we now get And So We Come Forth. The Apple Family: A Dinner on Zoom, available on YouTube for free until the end of August, as a fundraiser for The Actor’s Fund.
Just two months after I summed up my reaction to the fifth play as “Hallelujah,” I compare the sixth play to my experience now in lockdown – a safe, by-now too familiar routine. Still, there are enough moments of insight and pathos to be worth spending the 70 minutes in another visit with these comfortable characters — Richard Apple, his sisters Barbara, Marian and Jane, and Jane’s partner Tim — as they talk about their lives and give us a glimpse into The Way We Live Now.
That’s been the obvious aim of the series since we first met the Apples of Rhinebeck, New York on the stage of the New York Public Theater back in 2010, in the play That Hopey Changey Thing , which was set (and opened) on November 10, 2010, the date of the midterm elections. After three more plays – set and opened on the tenth anniversary of September 11th; on the 2012 Presidential election; and on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination – Nelson put the Apples aside in 2013, and produced four more plays about two other families living in Rhinebeck, all part of what collectively is now called the Rhinebeck Panorama.
In each of these plays, the characters – all portrayed by more or less the same splendid cast over the past decade – go about their ordinary day in real time and a low-key way, usually preparing a meal and then eating it, but also sporadically talking about their personal concerns, which reflect modestly and credibly the larger issues in America.
This approach worked well in April; what could be more reflective of the sudden era than to be talking to one another via Zoom about uncertainty and anxiety in a world turned upside down? The video of the play was reportedly seen 80,000 times from viewers in more than thirty countries.
In the new play, the continuing crises are taking their toll, as the five characters gather to share a meal, as best they can, virtually.
There are subtle tensions between Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) and Richard (Jay O. Sanders), who’s been staying with her. (Since the two actors are a married couple, they are in fact together in the frame.)
Jane Apple Halls (Sally Murphy), a freelance writer, has still not left her home after three months.
Marian (Laila Robins) tells her family: “I was lying in the bath last night. And it just occurred to me, I all of a sudden realized: I have not touched another human being for over three months.” She’s taken to gardening in her front yard in a halter top, as a man passes by at least five times a day walking his dog; her siblings have started to refer to him as her “gentleman caller.”
Tim (Stephen Kunken) tells everybody that his ex-wife in Brooklyn is insisting he take in their 18-year-old daughter for the summer: “she just says she really needs a break.” And the daughter needs to bring along a friend who was rescued from her battling parents.
But would this be safe to have them stay?
That’s just one of the many questions the characters ask over Zoom. People have questions; nobody has answers. “There now is such a great sense of urgency, but for what? Where will it end?” Richard quotes from a friend’s e-mail. The five tell of conversations they’ve had, e-mails they’ve gotten, and stories they’ve heard from friends and family, and friends of family – about how they’re adjusting, how they probably won’t get their jobs back, how they worry about the future. Richard tells a story he heard of two adult sons whose father had died; they were going to put the contents of his home in a dumpster, but then called on the father’s old roommate to check it out. The father was a poet with boxes of his papers, including correspondents with such famous friends as Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol. The story upsets Richard: “Pretty much everything, to me, now feels up in the air. And unreal. Unsettled. Uncertain. And there’s the worry, isn’t there, that anything and everything could end up in that fucking dumpster.”
In this way, third hand, we hear the story of Grandma’s nervous walk down 125th Street in the 1970s, where she heard a man behind her say “‘Whitey you ought to go home,” when she eventually realized he was actually saying “Lady, you dropped your comb.”
And that’s the sole directly detectable nod to what’s been happening around the country for more than a month. The racial reckoning seems to have bypassed completely the members of the Apple family. That’s true even of the young adult children (Jane, Tim and Richard are parents) and students (Barbara and Marian are teachers) that the characters talk about. (Perhaps Richard’s friend’s talk of a “sense of urgency” is an indirect reference.)
Here a question hovers over Nelson’s tenth play in the Rhinebeck Panorama about the Way We Live Now. Who does the “we” include? I felt something similar about Women of a Certain Age, which took place on Election Day 2016 but the characters barely even mentioned Trump.
I suppose it’s plausible that an educated, liberal white family in the Northeast could spend an hour-long phone conversation in early July, 2020 without making any mention of the massive response to the killing of George Floyd, as it is possible that such a family would not talk about Trump on Election Day. But it seems more likely the way Richard Nelson lives now, rather than “we” – and it feels like a missed opportunity.