A world getting bigger
Richard Nelson ends his Apple Zoom trilogy on a bitter note
“As I got older, I thought the world would get bigger, not smaller.” That line echoes endlessly in my head.
It is spoken by Barbara Apple in Incidental Moments of the Day, the final installment of Richard Nelson’s Apple Family: Life on Zoom trilogy. Incidental Moments also feels at times like the final offering of Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama, a series of 11 plays tracing the lives of three Rhinebeck families - the Apples, Gabriels, and Michaels - against the backdrop of a changing America. Eight of the plays were staged at The Public Theater; the latest three, on Zoom.
Barbara is played by Maryann Plunkett, a stalwart of the series and quietly heartbreaking in every installment. Incidental Moments finds Barbara, a schoolteacher, in a lonely and disillusioned place. Her brother Richard (Jay O. Sanders) is distracted by a new girlfriend. The family is splintered, not just by a pandemic. Barbara’s students have grown dismissive of her counsel - in her telling, because she is white. She speaks sadly of a world rapidly shifting beneath her feet.
“As I got older, I thought the world would get bigger, not smaller,” Barbara mourns. “Instead it feels to me like we’re making it smaller and smaller, we’re cutting up this, we’re dividing it into that …. These are the walls, cross them at your own risk. Doesn’t that just reduce who we are?”
In Ben Brantley’s first review after announcing his retirement as co-chief theater critic at The New York Times, he raved Incidental Moments. Brantley rightly praised Nelson’s precision in capturing the loneliness and longing of our forced isolation - I felt the same about the Apples very moving first Zoom installment, What Do We Need To Talk About?. Brantley also praised this new theme of the Apples feeling ‘left behind,’ writing: “[they are] paralyzed not only by fear of a plague, but of a changed society that might reject them.”
I am skeptical. Barbara has been established in the Apple plays as a thoughtful, open-hearted individual who thinks and speaks with care. Is it likely she would greet calls for social justice and equal representation by declaring that our world is shrinking? Or that she would wax nostalgic for a time when we were all just ‘one people’ - which of course, has never actually been a thing?
It doesn’t really sound like Barbara - it sounds like an oddly embittered Richard Nelson, awkwardly shoving those words into her mouth to suggest some kind of silencing.
Following a well-received inaugural Apple play broadcast in April, the world changed - again - after the murder of George Floyd. Even outside of that tectonic shift, it wasn’t clear what a second Apple Zoom would have to add. As it turned out, not much. And So We Come Forth wasn’t bad exactly. It was just sort of...there. The dramatic potency was gone. It felt like listening in on a run-of-the-mill family catch-up.
And So We Come Forth was also the first Rhinebeck play to not be hosted by The Public Theater. Given the racial justice reckoning shaking up the industry, The Public could not possibly have platformed it at that moment. Is this why Nelson feels silenced? He easily hosted further installments elsewhere, and the audience followed. Reaction has been mixed, but that’s because the second and third plays did not justify their own existence.
Much like Brantley, I saw and loved every one of Nelson’s Rhinebeck plays at The Public Theater. I was moved by their careful observations on familial bonds and tensions, all unspoken but keenly felt. I was drawn in by Nelson’s sparing, quiet stagings, which demanded over-stimulated audiences lean in and pay close attention. Every ensemble Nelson gathered dazzled me anew. Yet in this essential moment of reckoning, we must also accept that Nelson’s platform at The Public was absurd.
A world where the 12th successive play set around the same kitchen table is viewed as unwise feels like a world expanding, not contracting. We insist a different story be told not to silence Nelson, but because he’s already told his 11 times. The world is getting bigger. I think Barbara would see that, even if Nelson does not.