The Apple Family Plays weren’t quite what Oskar Eustis expected when he commissioned Richard Nelson. Eustis, the Artistic Director of The Public Theater in New York, was frustrated that he hadn’t read any big-cast, big-idea political plays about the current American moment. So he took Richard Nelson out to breakfast and made the pitch: If Nelson was game, Eustis would commission him to write a sprawling idea-rich play, perhaps a documentary-style chronicle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nelson suggested that he instead create a series of intimate plays about a single family and have them respond to the political issues of their day in their own idiosyncratic—character-based—ways.
Each play would feature the same characters: four siblings in middle age; the aging uncle who took over raising them after their father’s disappearance; and the on-again/off-again boyfriend of one of the sisters, the only outsider from the tight-knit family dynamic. Each play would open at the Public Theater on the day they were set—Election Day, 2010; September 11, 2011; Election Day 2012; and the 50th Anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 2013. Each would unfold over a meal in the same room, in a house in Rhinebeck NY, the town about two hours north of New York City where Richard Nelson lives. Each would take place in roughly real time, following the ebbs and flow of conversation and revelation.
“We’ve become used to viewing our politics and our political landscape through the lens of journalists or commentators who are now comedians,” says Nelson. “Their observations are certainly invaluable to us and the very best of them struggle valiantly to be a check on vanity, arrogance, ignorance, and stupidity. However, what has been missing from our political forum is the individual’s voice.” With The Apple Family Plays, Nelson attempts to correct the balance.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel