Oskar 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 listened, and several days later suggested something quite different: four tight-focus plays about an intimate family constellation, responding to the public issues of the time from a personal perspective. “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. “What has been missing from our political forum is the individual’s voice.” Nelson’s plays set out to shift that dynamic. Each of The Apple Family Plays unfolds over a meal in the same room, taking place in roughly real time and in naturalistic dialogue, full of the eddies, switchbacks, and contradictions of family conversation.
To add to the project’s sense of immediacy, each play opened at The Public Theater on the day it is set. To add to the play’s historical resonance, each play is set on a day of political and historical significance: Election Day 2010 (That Hopey Changey Thing); September 11, 2011 (Sweet and Sad); Election Day 2012 (Sorry); and the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 2013 (Regular Singing). Nelson initially called That Hopey Changey Thing a “disposable play,” imagining that it would be interesting to an audience in its first iteration in fall 2010, but ultimately evanescent. As he has continued to explore the Apple family’s story, however, the near-historicity of the plays has proven compelling—Eustis is producing all four in rep at The Public this fall—in part because the audience knows that time will knock the edges off the characters’ sense of despair or triumph. From the distance of a year or two, Nelson’s plays reveal themselves to be as much about time, intimacy, and family as they are about the characters’ ebb and flow of political engagement and disillusionment.
Instead of the epic political gesture that Eustis first envisioned, The Apple Family Plays provide a human-sized space to reckon with the promise, annoyance, and potential payoff of life in community with the family’s fellow Americans. “Every scene is a little psalm,” writes critic Scott Brown. “I’ve been trying to find words to describe what it felt like to be inside that theater as the election raged noisily outside, what it’s like listening to the Apples speak to each other in inside voices. It was a near-religious feeling of shared citizenship, one of the things theater was invented to foster…. [Nelson’s plays are] more than moments in time: They’re about what comes next, how hard it will be, and how we have no choice but to go through it together.”