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From Richard Nelson What do we need to talk about?
Photo: Courtesy of The Public
You can’t keep the theater low for long. In fact, you can’t keep it low for a minute. Even if you tear off all of their final parts, the playwrights just … adjust. Just six weeks after closing, a typical rehearsal period, as you will notice, the Public Theater is ready with a play devised for broadcast by Richard Nelson, rehearsed and produced at Zoom. In the old days, I tended to be a bit simplistic about what constitutes “theater.” I like a big top, so I thought that anything (dance, storytelling, drama) that happened in a theater counted. But now even that expansive definition seems insignificant. What do we need to talk about? It was made for and with screens, but still totally tastes of theater. Maybe it’s the main notes of the language, or the length of engagement between the cast, or the way the audience’s own imagination is a crucial player? I am trying to place it.
Nelson is best known for his two cycles in the audience: the four Apple family plays and the Gabriels trilogy, and with movement What do we need to talk about? he adds a fifth drama to the first. Since the apples mainly sat and talked That Hopey Changey thing, sweet and sad, sorry, and Regular singing, It feels like a horizontal slide to add a playset to a family video conference. We may have last seen the middle-aged siblings in 2014, but they are all adrift on and off the ‘stage’, stepping out of their chairs for drinks; still growling about the changing city of Rhinebeck, discussing art and loss and big trouble. Nelson’s murmurcore approach (he always has microphones hanging low over his sets, so his actors don’t have to project) translates well into the intimate aesthetic of a Zoom call. Through every little laptop lens we even see some characters plus clearly. You can learn a lot about each sister by noticing who uses their Airpods to maintain a consistent and reliable tone, and who trusts the computer’s microphone, which triggers when it tilts and completely fades when it turns its head.
The fading sister is Barbara, played by Maryann Plunkett, the actor whose faltering timbre is most vital to Nelson’s ongoing symphony. On the surface, Plunkett is a very still and withdrawn performer: her smooth face and slightly fixed eyes create a kind of lag in her responses, while she vocally shakes with excitement. She plays both still and troubled waters, and both are deep. Barbara has just returned home from the hospital, and although she did not have COVID-19, she nearly died, and there is still a shadow surrounding her. Her protective brother Richard (Jay O. Sanders) stays with her (Plunkett and Sanders are married, so they are taking refuge together), and tonight they have met on a Zoom call with the Marian sisters (Laila Robins) and Jane (Sally Murphy), and Jane’s husband Tim (Stephen Kunken), who has been quarantined in another part of Jane’s bathroom house. (“Tonight, by the way, lasts four days. You can see the play here until Sunday)
Digital drama only takes a little time to announce its model, because Nelson is a playwright who likes to show us the recipe while presenting the dish. Characters in their cycles frequently speak of Chekhov to draw our attention to Nelson’s dramatic prototype; In her latest play in Public, a discussion of postmodern dance was actually an intentional statement of her type of vernacular theater. In other hands, this style of meta-proclamation of “what I’m doing as I do” here would make it all symbolic and strange, but Nelson is an unconditional naturalist. The dialogue wanders, sometimes backing up and filling up (“Didn’t I tell you this? I thought you knew it”) to give everything a discarded chance. Hyperreal language hides the didactic nature of its real text: in its form, it is as preacher and allegorical as a work of religious morality. Every time a character says a “writer friend” said something to him, you hear Nelson quote himself. If someone talks about a work of art, they have been given a code key. In What do we need to talk about? Tim brings up The cherry orchard, so you can relate Chekhov’s story to the Apples (a family in grief, frozen by the impossibility of action), and then Barbara mentions The Decameron.
Barbara, a teacher, has been teaching her students about the Boccaccio Plaguetime Story Collection, and now she is asking her family to each tell a story. One has a piece of history about the family; one has uncovered an exciting authorship mystery. “During that story, I didn’t think of a pandemic,” says Barbara after Jane ends. Here Nelson strongly underscores his mission, using storytelling to simultaneously acknowledge the real world (pretend actor Tim is upset by the death of true actor Mark Blum) and distract ourselves from it. While his self-identification with Chekhov has not been convincing in the last few tougher moves, this tribute to Boccaccio makes perfect sense. Forget your troubles, travelers. Stay with us for a story or two, then click.
I will admit here that my affection for Nelson’s style had eroded in the course of public cycles. If you’re in the New York area, you can see movies from the Apple and Gabriel series, and you’ll hear how over the decade the style began to become routine (in the millionth “I thought I told you so,” I screamed), and how the exact focus on Rinbeckianism began to narrow in self esteem. Artists are such ardent talents, and their ease with each other is such an inspiring announcement to keep an ensemble together for so long, there were always pleasures, but it certainly had ceased to desire the Nelsonian atmosphere as it did when Apple’s works were new. .
Still What do we need to talk about? pumps fresh blood. First, Nelson returns to modesty, deflating both length (lasting a little over an hour) and part of his rhetoric around art. Second, the camera gives us the proximity (and perfect audibility) that we crave with those subtle gift actors. Nelson has always served the actors well, but here the good is better. The screen allows Murphy to shine like a comedy power that can operate in a pianissimo; Sanders hits your composure by letting his eye shine, just a little; Plunkett twists your heart silently waiting for his conversation to start. And third, it is very welcome. The works of the Apple family were always about being in a bright room surrounded by death. Regular singing, for example, the family gathered in the kitchen while Marian’s ex-husband lay in bed upstairs. It seemed that someone always died in those plays, only off stage. Now “upstairs” has become the entire city, including the stages, and the family kitchen has been reduced to a small YouTube rectangle. I stopped the video for a minute before the show ended because I was getting overwhelmed. It was no use. Even motionless, the little YouTube window seemed so brave, bright there, with the rest of the world so dark.
