84 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
THE THEATRE
REAL TIME
Richard Nelson’s family cycles capture the moment.
BYALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN
O
n November 9, 2016, I was alone,
driving in the rain from Massa-
chusetts to New York, weeping and mut-
tering to myself before falling silent for
long, baffled miles. I had made the re-
verse trip the day before, to report on an
Election Night party at Wellesley Col-
lege that had been planned to celebrate
the historic victory of the school’s alumna
Hillary Clinton. As I drove now, I kept
the radio on for bitter company. Hillary
conceded and Donald Trump declared
victory; the morning d.j.s were giddy
with surprise as they parsed the news.
Eventually, I found myself listening
to an interview with the playwright and
director Richard Nelson, whose play
“Women of a Certain Age” had opened
at the Public Theatre the previous eve-
ning. Nelson explained that the play was,
in fact, set on November 8, 2016; like the
opening-night audience, his nervous char-
acters had no knowledge of what was
about to happen. “Women of a Certain
Age” was the third and final piece in “The
Gabriels,” a cycle about a family in the
town of Rhinebeck, New York, where
Nelson has lived for more than thirty-five
years. The first play had premièred in
March, not long after Super Tuesday, and
the second in September, tracking the
campaign season in real time. Nelson had
understood that women would be cen-
tral to the election, and so he had made
them central onstage—five out of a cast
of six. The project sounded fascinating,
and more than a little perverse. Nightly,
Nelson’s characters would be on the cusp
of the forever-changed present, as would
the audience. I made a note to get tick-
ets, then promptly descended back into
shock and forgot about it.
Fortunately, all three “Gabriels” plays
were filmed by PBS and are available
online. The magic of live performance
is often lost onscreen, but whoever was
in charge of capturing Nelson’s work
did an unusually sensitive job. The plays,
masterpieces of exquisite subtlety, are
set in the round, in the kitchen of the
home of Mary Gabriel, a retired doc-
tor. At the start of the first play, “Hun-
gry,” Mary’s playwright husband has
been dead for four months, and the fam-
ily has gathered to scatter his ashes in
the Hudson River. Old tensions flare
and subside; conversations unfurl and
dissolve; stories are told, memories half
uncovered; food is prepared, then actu-
ally cooked (a Nelson hallmark—these
are true kitchen-sink plays, down to the
running tap) and eaten.
As with Nelson’s previous, four-play
cycle, “The Apple Family,” which was
also set in a Rhinebeck house on polit-
ically resonant days—the 2010 midterm
elections; the ten-year anniversary of
9/11—Chekhov hovers over the project,
with its close attention to the loneliness,
fissures, and comforts of communal life.
My initial suspicion that the plays’ timely
hooks would feel like gimmicks dissi-
pated as I watched; they are more like
magnifying glasses that focus and in-
tensify the moment.
The Gabriels are white and slipping
down the class ladder, and one theme
of the cycle is their sense of being left
behind—but by whom? After all, they
generally share the politics of the wealthy
weekenders from New York who, en-
ticed by the scenery, flatter their town
by pricing them out of it. The family’s
frustration and fear of displacement
don’t trace neatly onto the kind of re-
verse punditry that, following the elec-
tion, sent journalists scrambling to find
“forgotten” Americans to consult, like
retroactive oracles. The Gabriels share
a name with an angel sent as an emis-
sary from God, but, like most of us, they
aren’t sure what message they’re sup-
posed to bear.
“
C
onversations During Difficult
Times,” the first play in Nelson’s
new, two-part series, “The Michaels,”
has just opened at the Public (as usual,
he directs). It’s also set in a house in
