There’s been ample time, during the past few endless weeks, for a person who misses theatre to think about what theatre gives us that’s different from what we get from other kinds of art and performance. We have television to entertain us, movies and books to sustain us. What can plays do? When in doubt, it never hurts to consult Hamlet. “The purpose of playing,” the Danish prince tells us, “was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Theatre can be fleet, spare, and adaptive, reactive to and reflective of the immediate conditions of its creation. Plays may spend years in development, but, in a pinch, a few days will do. Ideally, a play shares a room with its audience, but, as we’re all discovering, a screen can work, too. Fabulous effects are nice if you can get them—there’s a reason that the National Theatre’s weekly streams of its beautifully filmed productions, with their luscious set and lighting designs, have become wildly popular—but the truth is that all you need to make a play work is a human voice or two.
Going by Hamlet’s definition of theatre as a mirror for the body of our times, the end of April brought the first great original play of quarantine, Richard Nelson’s “What Do We Need to Talk About?,” which was commissioned by the Public, as a benefit performance, and streamed on YouTube on the last Wednesday of the month. The play is a surprise addition to Nelson’s “Apple Family” cycle, the accidental child conceived long after the rest of the kids are grown. Until now, there were four plays about the four Apples, middle-aged siblings based in Rhinebeck, New York. The first one was performed in 2010, the last in 2013, and, as with “The Gabriels,” Nelson’s subsequent play cycle set in Rhinebeck, each took place, and was performed, during a moment of national significance. Recently, Channel Thirteen made recordings of the earlier Apple plays available to stream, and it was a subversive delight, given the hagiographic mood of the moment, to discover that the first line spoken in the first play, “That Hopey Changey Thing,” is “Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo.” (The play takes place on the day of the 2010 midterms, which happened to also be the date of the governor’s election.) “You see, with Andrew, everything is about politics, celebrity politics. What gets noticed, what makes the impression,” Richard Apple (Jay O. Sanders), a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office, says. The governor’s current daily press conferences, acts of public service which double as canny pieces of theatre in their own right, may be the exception that proves the rule.
The new play seems to have come as a surprise to Nelson, too. He was working on the second installment of “The Michaels,” his latest Rhinebeck-set cycle, when the coronavirus hit. The success of fictional characters can be measured by their power to endure in the mind, the way people do; when Nelson thought about how he might address the pandemic, the Apples were right there, waiting to be reanimated and spoken through.
“What Do We Need to Talk About?” (directed by Nelson) takes place, inevitably, on Zoom, which, for once, isn’t an irritating technical compromise but an integral plot point. Rather than gathering around the dining-room table, as they usually do, the siblings congregate online, to catch up for an hour or so at the end of the day. The first to appear is Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), who, as we discover, has just come home from the hospital, where she managed to recover from COVID-19. Richard (Sanders, who, like the rest of the cast, is reprising his role), the lone brother of the family, is quarantined with her; the fact that he, and not the domestic-minded Barbara, cooks and serves dinner tells us how serious her condition must have been. (No actors were harmed, or social-distancing protocols violated, in the making of this play; Sanders and Plunkett are married.)
One by one, new Zoom squares pop up onscreen, outlined in marquee neon. Jane (Sally Murphy), the youngest Apple, and Tim (Stephen Kunken), her partner, are in different rooms in their Rhinebeck apartment, because Tim has a mild case of the virus. Marian (Laila Robins), the middle sister, arrives late, as she always does, nicely dressed and wearing lipstick in an assertion of dignity. Apart, together, they drink wine, poke fun at one another, briefly squabble, and discuss the banalities of the day. Cuomo gets grudging high marks (“Who would have believed it?”); there is talk of the risks and the rewards of grocery shopping, the Zen satisfactions of dish-washing, and other aspects of the new normal.
All of Nelson’s Rhinebeck plays pull off sneaky feats of verisimilitude. Just as things seem almost too ordinary and unremarkable to bear depiction—though how remarkable that the habits of quarantine already feel rote—a startling deepening takes place. In “What Do We Need to Talk About?,” the tone begins to shift when Tim, who is an actor and a restaurateur, reminisces about an acquaintance, the real-life actor Mark Blum, who died in March, of coronavirus complications, at the age of sixty-nine. All the actors in the production likely knew Blum, but their characters didn’t, and watching them react to the news of the loss of this stranger with muted, abstract sympathy yielded a double-edged grief.
A second shift happens when Barbara, who’s a high-school English teacher, tells the group that she’s assigned the Decameron to her students, and suggests, à la Boccaccio, that each member of the call tell a story to entertain the others. Jane, a writer with a childlike, delighted spirit, goes first, offering a twisty bit of intrigue about women authors and identity-swapping in the nineteen-fifties; Marian, a second-grade teacher who’s working on a book about the family, follows, with a clue to an old Apple mystery that she discovered in the course of her research; Richard tells a joke about President Franklin Pierce and a yappy dog sent by a visiting Japanese delegation; and Tim, who has theatre on the brain, relates a theory that “The Cherry Orchard” is about “the need to heal,” which might sound like twenty-first-century self-help babble projected backward onto Chekhov, if it weren’t for the circumstances. In hard times, we look to art to tell us the things we need to hear.
Barbara’s contribution is a recording that she made of the sibling’s late uncle Benjamin (Jon DeVries) reciting the Walt Whitman poem “The Wound-Dresser,” which he did, in the second Apple play, to commemorate the anniversary of September 11th. The poem is narrated by an old man who cares for injured Civil War soldiers, and what was sombre and heartrending in the earlier play is now freshly piercing. Another decade, another crisis, this one unending, still unfathomable. Switch the old and the young, the healers and the dying. Barbara—reserved, pragmatic, and irony-proof, the predictable axle around which her siblings rotate—can’t express in words what she feels about her own brush with death, so she says it with music: the “Dona nobis pacem” from Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which she plays through her phone speaker, an offering to all of us behind our own screens.
As the play ends, the siblings sign off one by one, leaving those remaining to gossip about them in their wake, until Barbara is left alone again. She stares at her screen, looking at her own face, as if registering that, against the odds, she is still here. On the night of the performance, more than five thousand viewers looked back. We were there, too.
Theatre is an art of the present, which makes it prone to error. On May 2nd, Molière in the Park, an outdoor troupe that had its inaugural season last year, together with the French Institute Alliance Française and the Prospect Park Alliance, put on a Zoom production of “The Misanthrope” (in Richard Wilbur’s nimble translation, directed by Lucie Tiberghien). The performance suffered at first from technical difficulties—a pesky audio-feedback loop sent the actors’ words boomeranging back to them—which was briefly annoying and then, suddenly, became wonderful, as viewers messaged their support and waited patiently for the problem to be solved. The hiccup made live theatre feel alive, and what could be better than that?
The Molière in the Park approach suggests a simple, satisfying formula for making theatre in the age of the lockdown. Choose a classic text—preferably not too long, preferably funny—get good actors to perform it into their devices, and voilà. It helps that Molière didn’t much care about his plays’ settings; the language is the thing. This “Misanthrope” takes place during quarantine, of course, in an environment of comical, generic luxury. (Kris Stone’s Zoom production design transposed the actors into what looked like a West Elm catalogue; in one scene, their clothing matched the virtual wallpaper of the virtual rooms they were in, a nice touch.) The misanthrope in question is Alceste (Jared McNeill, who has a lovely, salted-butter kind of voice), a nobleman revolted by the falsity and the folly of the world, except when that folly involves Célimène (Jennifer Mudge), his paramour, who flirts as she breathes and won’t stop entertaining suitors. Much drama ensues (“The Real Housewives of Molière!” a member of the digital audience aptly commented), alternately doused by Alceste’s buddy Philinte (Postell Pringle) and enflamed by the gossip Arsinoé (a bawdy Heidi Armbruster). “I’ve made up my mind / to have no further commerce with mankind,” Alceste finally decides, stumping off to join the rest of us in isolation. When the cast reappeared to take their Zoom bows, inclining their heads toward their computer cameras, they were greeted with written “bravo”s and the sound—joyful to imagine—of many yellow hand emojis clapping. ♦
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The First Great Original Play of Quarantine - The New Yorker
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