THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 71
is Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), who,
as we discover, has just come home from
the hospital, where she managed to re-
cover from Covid-19. Richard (San-
ders, who, like the rest of the cast, is re-
prising 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 so-
cial-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. Mar-
ian (Laila Robins), the middle sister,
arrives late, as she always does, nicely
dressed and wearing lipstick in an as-
sertion of dignity. Apart, together, they
drink wine, poke fun at one another,
briefly squabble, and discuss the ba-
nalities of the day. Cuomo gets grudg-
ing high marks (“Who would have be-
lieved 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 hab-
its 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, rem-
inisces 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 watch-
ing 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 Bar-
bara, who’s a high-school English
teacher, tells the group that she’s as-
signed the Decameron to her students,
and suggests, à la Boccaccio, that each
member of the call tell a story to en-
tertain 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 sec-
ond-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, re-
lates a theory that “The Cherry Or-
chard” 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 cir-
cumstances. In hard times, we look to
art to tell us the things we need to hear.
Barbara’s contribution is a record-
ing that she made of the sibling’s late
uncle Benjamin ( Jon DeVries) recit-
ing 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, prag-
matic, 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 remain-
ing 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 thou-
sand viewers looked back. We were
there, too.T
heatre 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 theFrench Institute Alliance Française
and the Prospect Park Alliance, put
on a Zoom production of “The Mis-
anthrope” (in Richard Wilbur’s nim-
ble 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 wonder-
ful, 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 lux-
ury. (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 Al-
ceste ( Jared McNeill, who has a lovely,
salted-butter kind of voice), a noble-
man 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 entertain-
ing suitors. Much drama ensues (“The
Real Housewives of Molière!” a mem-
ber of the digital audience aptly com-
mented), alternately doused by Al-
ceste’s buddy Philinte (Postell Pringle)
and enflamed by the gossip Arsinoé
(a bawdy Heidi Armbruster). “I’ve
made up my mind/to have no fur-
ther commerce with mankind,” Al-
ceste 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.