Richard suggested a set of family plays, all set in the Apple Family household in Rhinebeck, New York, all opening on the day they were set, and therefore all being rewritten up to the last minute. Each of the opening days would be a date of national significance, and hence have a public aspect to them, and yet the plays would be very much intimate, conversational, family dramas. His proposal brilliantly fulfilled one of The Public’s desires: to have plays that deal with great national events in a timely (how could they be more timely!) fashion, and completely ignored our desire to have an epic play about our war in Afghanistan.
From such selective responses great artists make their work.
We agreed, and set the opening dates for the first three Apple Family plays then and there: November 2, 2010 (the date of the midterm elections); September 11, 2011 (the tenth anniversary of 9/11); and November 6, 2012 (presidential election day). The fourth play, conceived later, was set on November 22, 2013, fifty years after JFK was shot in Dallas.
In order to fulfill that plan, we had to create a company of actors, and we were blessed to assemble an amazing group: Jay O. Sanders, Maryann Plunkett, Laila Robins and Jon deVries were with us for the whole journey; J. Smith Cameron for the first three, and Shuler Hensley for the first two. J. and Shuler were brilliantly replaced by Sally Murphy and Stephen Kunken. In this way, we achieved that rarest of American theatrical beasts, a long-term (albeit small) acting company.
These actors, and the extraordinary brilliance of their playing, demonstrated the powerful artistic rewards of long-term ensemble acting. This process also revealed what writers have known at least since Shakespeare’s time, but which the current American theater rarely allows: playwrights benefit enormously when they are writing for specific actors who they know well. Characters can develop in amazing complexity and depth when they are the creation, not only of the writer who composes them, but of the actor who embodies them. The creation of this mini-company was a huge achievement in its own right, reminding us that one of the core original promises of the not-for-profit theater movement was to create better working (and living!) conditions for our actors.
The plays themselves turned out to be minor miracles, intimate conversations of a depth and thematic resonance we rarely experience in the theater. This is theater for grown-ups, theater that takes seriously its obligation to map and record our national psyche. Richard has made almost a second profession of his versions of Russian drama, both classic and contemporary, and one feels the gracing presence of Chekhov throughout these plays. Like Chekhov’s characters, the Apples are decent, highly educated, caring people who love their country, understand that something has gone terribly wrong in its politics, and have no confidence in their own ability to change it. They are the worried citizens of a nation on the brink of great upheaval, and they register with seismographic sensitivity and precision the temblors to come.
Richard is allergic to the shouting that makes up much of contemporary American political discourse, and much of American drama, and these plays avoid any easy melodramatics or posturing. He is interested in the conversations which don’t happen in public anymore, conversations based less on conflict than on self-exposure, where the interest of the characters is not in relentlessly pursuing their objectives but in attempting to share their deepest reflections, and thereby become less lonely. I know of no American plays which so effortlessly incorporate literature and American history; these characters are able to listen to Walt Whitman, and allow us to listen to Whitman, because they aren’t busily and noisily pursuing their own desires. They want to connect with each other, and in so doing, allow us in the audience to connect with them, and with ourselves.
The Apple Family plays model not only a different kind of drama, but a different idea of humanity; one based not on conflict but on collegiality, not on achievement but on being; not on selfishness, but on listening, and love. The Apples struggle with fragility, with their own limitations, and with that greatest of human limitations, death. They struggle, but they struggle together. And as they talk, and eat, and take care of each other, they remember both their own history and their nation’s.
Adorno said: “All reification is a forgetting”; these plays take memory as their great subject because Richard knows that it is only by remembering that we can blow life back into a frozen world; only by sharing our past that we can actually create a shared human future. Uncle Benjamin’s loss of short-term memory is, in these terms, a subtly constructed Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt; by making memory contingent and problematic, Richard is drawing attention to how much we need memory to be fully human.
Richard has been a tireless champion of the rights of artists in the American theater; The Public’s stance toward taking subsidiary rights from the plays they produce has changed entirely because of his activism. He has lived a life that embodies the values his plays talk about, and is that rare American artist who can actually serve as an exemplar of how to live an artistic life driven by moral as well as aesthetic values.
These plays reflect Richard’s deep love of family, of actors, of writers, and of the theater. Like Chekhov’s Konstantin before him, he despairs of the theater we have but has enormous faith in what the theater can become. Unlike Konstantin, but like Chekhov, Richard can actually create that theater. For those of us who were privileged to watch The Apple Family plays come into existence, year by year, the return to The Public every fall became a kind of secular religious ritual. I was not the only audience member whose eyes would tear up at the start of each play, watching those beloved characters walk back on stage and set the table to begin a new chapter in their, and our, saga. These plays, as radical in their quiet way as anything I have ever seen, are small masterpieces.
New York City
September 2014
A Conversation in Rhinebeck Election Night, November 2nd 2010
For Corin Redgrave
PRODUCTION HISTORY
That Hopey Changey Thing was commissioned by and first produced at The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Andrew D. Hamingson, Executive Director) in New York on November 2, 2010. The director was Richard Nelson; the set and costume design were by Susan Hilferty, the lighting design was by Jennifer Tipton, the sound design was by Scott Lehrer; the assistant director was David F. Chapman, the production stage manager was Pamela Salling, the stage manager was Amber Wedin. The cast was:
| RICHARD APPLE | Jay O. Sanders |
| BARBARA APPLE | Maryann Plunkett |
| MARIAN APPLE PLATT | Laila Robins |
| JANE APPLE HALLS | J. Smith-Cameron |
| BENJAMIN APPLE | Jon DeVries |
| TIM ANDREWS | Shuler Hensley |
In December 2013, the complete series of The Apple Family was presented at The Public Theater in rotating repertory. That Hopey Changey Thing was revived with Sally Murphy playing Jane and Stephen Kunken as Tim.
CHARACTERS
The Apples:
RICHARD APPLE, a lawyer in the State Attorney General’s office, lives in Manhattan.
BARBARA APPLE, his sister, a high school English teacher, lives in Rhinebeck.
MARIAN APPLE PLATT, his sister, a second grade teacher, lives in Rhinebeck.
JANE APPLE HALLS, his sister, a nonfiction writer and teacher, lives with Tim in Manhattan.
BENJAMIN APPLE, his uncle, a retired actor, lives with Barbara in Rhinebeck.
TIM