THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019 85
Rhinebeck, this one owned by Rose Mi-
chael (Brenda Wehle), a choreographer
of modern dance. In her heyday, Rose
had her own company and was on a
first-name basis with her comrades and
competitors: Merce, Twyla, Pina, Paul.
She’s still striking at sixty-six, tall and
thin with long, slightly bowed legs, close-
cropped white hair, and a fierce, hawk-
ish gaze. She is also dying of Stage IV
ovarian cancer, but resists conventional
treatment, which her worried family
understands to be an expression of fear.
Family, though, is not a straightfor-
ward concept here. Rose lives with Kate
(Maryann Plunkett), a retired high-
school teacher who once taught Rose’s
daughter, Lucy (Charlotte Bydwell).
Rose and Kate have been together only
six months; they met just before Rose’s
diagnosis, and what promised to be a
late-in-life love affair has quickly be-
come a patient-nurse relationship, with
Kate cooking and caring for the stub-
born invalid. Lucy’s sweet-natured fa-
ther, David ( Jay O. Sanders), an arts
manager and a producer, is now mar-
ried to the spiky Sally (Rita Wolf ), who
used to dance in Rose’s company. There
is chosen family, too, in the person of
Irenie (Haviland Morris), another for-
mer dancer of Rose’s, who has arrived
from New York for a weeklong visit that
may double as a farewell.
Nelson builds characters who are
rich in spirit and soul and sets them in
motion like tops. Toward and away from
one another they spin, in the nerve cen-
ter of the kitchen, as Kate shuffles back
and forth to the oven, making a quiche.
(The pitch-perfect scenic design, with
its familiar old stove and wooden table,
is by Jason Ardizzone-West.) As the
title tells us, conversation—distinct from
its showier, stiffer cousin, dialogue—is
the medium of exchange; Nelson’s ac-
tors speak in an emphatically natural-
istic style, and they are gentler with one
another than we expect onstage fami-
lies to be. They tease without sniping,
and let one another finish sentences.
All the actors are wonderful, particu-
larly Wehle and the Nelson regulars
Sanders and Plunkett, masters of ges-
ture and nuance.
I saw “Conversations During Diffi-
cult Times” on the day it is set, Octo-
ber 27, 2019. Nelson had revised the play
up to the last minute; it included ref-
erences to the morning’s rain and to the
just-announced assassination of Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi. That was the one
line in this otherwise limpid show that
sounded artificial, like a newspaper held
up by a hostage as proof of the date—
which, in a sense, it was. The unprece-
dented way in which Trump and talk
of him have infected even the most in-
timate scenes of daily life poses a seri-
ous challenge to Nelson’s vision. He
can’t ignore the man, but he doesn’t want
to give him oxygen, either; just men-
tioning him is a cliché. At one point,
David riffs on a ghastly-sounding play
that he saw in Paris involving Trump
and Kermit the Frog. (He doesn’t iden-
tify the playwright as Elfriede Jelinek;
this is the theatrical equivalent of a sub-
tweet.) Nelson is stuck swinging at the
top of the national Ferris wheel along
with everybody else, peeking through
his fingers while trying not to look down,
but he makes it clear that he is not will-
ing to fight the grotesque with more of
the same.
Like “The Gabriels,” this first in-
stallment of “The Michaels” is con-
cerned with the lines of transmission
between women. Lucy, now in her early
thirties, has followed in her mother’s
footsteps and become a dancer and a
choreographer; she and her cousin May
(Matilda Sakamoto) are preparing a ret-
rospective of some of Rose’s dances. In
the scene at the heart of the play, Lucy
whirls around the narrow kitchen, show-
ing her mother what she’s been work-
ing on. At the performance I attended,
she started the dance with her back to
the section where I was sitting; when
she turned, her face expressed the ex-
hilarating and impossible hope of being
found worthy of real praise. Of course,
Rose cuts her down; in the grand tra-
dition of egomaniacal, domineering art-
ists, she refuses to distinguish between
tribute and challenge. How new it still
is, though, for this dynamic to be de-
picted with powerful mothers and their
striving daughters, rather than with fa-
thers and sons. “She said—and this I
found interesting—there are certain
parts of women’s lives that have never
ever been danced,” Kate reports of Rose.
That is what Rose is working on, in the
short time left to her: a dance that will
reflect the ordinary work of living in a
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