The Apple Family Awaits the Big Blue Wave in We’ll See

It’s a little after 6 a.m. and I’ve just checked the election results. I told myself I wouldn’t look before going to bed, or during the night if (when) my baby woke me up. Now, my cats are chirping along with the birds outside and I share their excitement — what is this thing with feathers? Where has it been for so long?

About a hundred miles north, in a Rhinebeck of the mind, there are others making themselves tea and opening their phones to a swell of blue. They are the Apple family, creations of the playwright Richard Nelson and the backbone of his Rhinebeck Panorama, a 13-play series (which previously seemed to have finished at 12) about three families in that up-the-Hudson town, all liberal, all in need of a bit of Chekhovian philosophizing around election time. Nelson began writing about the Apples 16 years ago, just before the first midterms of Obama’s presidency. Like all of us, they’ve been on a ride, through Zoom and back again. Last night, I joined them for a couple of hours as they — this time, predominantly the four Apple siblings, Barbara, Richard, Marian, and Jane — picked at their pasta and searched for ways to make Election-Day conversation without (Barbara’s rule) ever mentioning “him” by name. (The tradition of the Rhinebeck plays is that they play out in real time along with an unfolding political event. Now that We’ll See’s event is over, it becomes a different play — I wonder how its anxieties will feel to audiences from tonight on.)

Here I have to make two confessions. One: This is my first direct experience with the Apples. For many years now they’ve been like friends of friends that I’ve heard of often but never met. Others will be able to speak to Nelson’s latest visit with them, potently titled We’ll See, in context; I must reflect on it as its own event. Two: This morning, good will colors everything. I feel like Scrooge leaning out the window to ask that remarkable boy what day it is. If I pause, though, I recall an uneven theatrical experience, oddly strained despite its intentionally and meticulously constructed verisimilitude. I hesitate to use words like “realism” or “naturalism” — they’re fraught with their own histories and mean different things to different people. The facts are that Nelson has a typical way in which he makes plays (he frequently also directs his own work, as he does here): Sets are minimal and domestic — a table, some chairs, a few old Persian rugs, a water pitcher, banana bread. Actors dress as if they walked in off the street, move without excess affect, and speak more softly than they might in other plays as, above them, a phalanx of little black microphones always hangs, the constant companions in Nelson’s search for intimacy.

Why then, does so much of the Apple family’s conversation in We’ll See feel strangely hyper-performed? There are wonderful actors on stage here, including the Nelson regulars Maryann Plunkett as (at 74) the oldest Apple sibling, Barbara, and Jay O. Sanders as her brother Richard. But no one, especially not Sally Murphy as the youngest sibling, Jane, is free from the intermittent but persistent sense that they’re in some kind of very mature children’s program. They use each other’s names with uncanny frequency; they turn to each other and ask questions that conveniently set up the next piece of necessary information. Here’s a characteristic run of dialogue from the siblings and Yvonne (Yvonne Winters), Richard’s partner and an actor who’s living with cancer (the theater is as often in the Apples’ dining room as vice versa):

Yvonne: I sit there in rehearsal, Barbara … And it has occurred to me more than once that in tough times, a theater feels like the healthiest place to be.
Barbara: What do you mean?
Yvonne: I said this to the actress playing the nanny, and she told me about something she’s heard called: ‘Dr. Theater.’
Jane: What’s that? (to Richard) Do you know?
Richard: No.
Yvonne: She said when she had her cancer and, like me, was going through some pretty tough treatment while doing a play… For those two and half hours she was in the play, in front of an audience, in the theater, she was no longer a woman with cancer, she was someone else.
Jane: You mean, her character?
Yvonne: No. Herself but without cancer.

“What do you mean?” “Do you know?” “You mean, her character?” There’s something going on in all these moments — a slight but grating overdoing of these peoples’ ability to get on with one another. Everyone is being so good. No one says anything truly random — the Apple siblings are always inspiring another pertinent story among the group; everyone listens like students at the front of the class; no one even interrupts. If we need to know something, someone will politely launch the appropriate ball up in the air so that someone else can tap it our way.

The effect of all this niceness and neatness is that moments that might land with a sense of wit or profundity instead plop with sentimentality. “Better than being cynical,” Barbara would say, and does, to her sister Marian (Laila Robins), the tartest of the bunch. That may be so, but I would argue that there’s a third option. Yvonne’s “Herself but without cancer” should ping with resonance. Instead, it feels tonally set up to induce not ah!s, but awws. There’s a crucial difference.

There are exceptions to the show’s recurring feeling of contrivance. The enormously sensitive Plunkett is often responsible for them as Barbara, who’s quietly going through a tragedy in the background of all the wandering talk. She is — or has been, for decades — a high-school English teacher. Now, she’s retiring, but the circumstances are awful. With the midterms coming up — and with life being what it is, as ICE snatches parents away from their children, even in the playgrounds of Rhinebeck — she tried to give her students a space to talk about their worries and fears. The gesture backfired. One student screamed at another and fled the class; Barbara lost the reins and wound up in the smarmy principal’s office being thanked for her many years of service. 

It’s a crushing, deeply believable story, and Plunkett’s telling of it is one of the best stretches in the show. Suddenly, the smothering sense of a playwright who wants to talk about certain things diminishes. (Oh, how the Apples love quoting to one another — Whitman, Sally Rooney, Oliver Sacks, George Eliot. I, too, adore the last lines of Middlemarch, but you really have to earn a big gun like that.) Instead, a character speaks from deep within herself. Despite a surface that might suggest otherwise, it happens too seldom in We’ll See. Don’t get me wrong: Today, I’m thrilled for the Apples and for all of us, but Nelson’s title still applies. Liberals, whether playwrights, characters, or politicians, need more than occasional wins and good intentions.

We’ll See is at the Public Theater through November 29.