70 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
In Nelson’s new play, Zoom isn’t a technical compromise but an integral plot point.
THETHEATRE
NATURE’S MIRROR
Richard Nelson’s Apple family and Molière’s misanthrope on Zoom.By Alexandra SchwartzILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
mediate 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 pro-
ductions, 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 the-
atre as a mirror for the body of our
times, the end of April brought the firstgreat original play of quarantine, Rich-
ard 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 con-
ceived 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 Ga-
briels,” Nelson’s subsequent play cycle
set in Rhinebeck, each took place, and
was performed, during a moment of
national significance. Recently, Chan-
nel 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 impres-
sion,” 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 the-
atre in their own right, may be the ex-
ception 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, inev-
itably, on Zoom, which, for once, isn’t
an irritating technical compromise but
an integral plot point. Rather than gath-
ering 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 appearT
here’s been ample time, during the
past few endless weeks, for a per-
son 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 televi-
sion to entertain us, movies and books
to sustain us. What can plays do? When
in doubt, it never hurts to consult Ham-
let. “The purpose of playing,” the Dan-
ish 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 adap-
tive, reactive to and reflective of the im-