Are the Apples becoming must-see TV?
Their latest episode, “And So We Come Forth,” which was performed live on Wednesday and will remain available on YouTube through Aug. 26, had me thinking of the pleasure of sitcoms and the addictiveness of daytime drama.
You remember the Apples: that thoughtful, cultured and economically precarious middle-class family gathering over dinners in Rhinebeck, N.Y.? We met them when “That Hopey Changey Thing,” written and directed by Richard Nelson, opened at the Public Theater on the night of the 2010 midterm elections. Three more in the first series of plays about the family — and also about American bewilderment more broadly — opened on the dates of significant milestones and anniversaries in the country’s history through 2013.
The thing about the Apples — and then the Gabriels and the Michaels, neighbors who were the subjects of further Nelson plays in what he calls the “Rhinebeck Panorama” — is that their own milestones were deeply downplayed. Inverting the strategy of traditional family drama, Nelson focused on the moments between the crises: the intimate microaggressions, the not-quite-idle chatter, the prickly rapprochements. Divorces, job losses and deaths all happened offstage.
The result was a genre nearly new to the theater: inside-out soap opera, riveting and relatable but without hokey climaxes. Nelson’s direction likewise explored a new extreme of naturalism that went well beyond the kitchen sink to include, among other appliances, the fridge and the oven. Real meals were cooked in real time; you could smell the bread baking.
Just as the coronavirus epidemic stopped us from gathering at the Public, it stopped the Apples from gathering for live, in-person dinners. Their return for a fifth play in April — the sorrowful “What Do We Need to Talk About?” — was set (and produced) on Zoom, allowing some 80,000 people to view it since. They discovered Richard Apple, now sheltering with his sister Barbara, who had survived infection; Jane Apple, sequestering in one room of her house while her boyfriend, Tim, recovered in another; and sister Marian, home alone on a street nearby. Their separation and isolation, beautifully rendered by the new aesthetics of Zoom, were heartbreaking.
Zoom is where the family remains in “And So We Come Forth,” the slightly indulgent but still powerful sixth installment of their story. It finds the Apples, after months of limited contact with the outer world, beginning to lose it over the course of 60 minutes. Nerves are frayed. Dogs are having accidents. The homemade dinners are now Indian takeout (from a real Rhinebeck restaurant called Cinnamon) and, in Jane’s case, cereal.
Their tetchy turn inward is reflected in the topics of conversation. Barbara, a high school teacher, grouses because her former students have rejected her attempts to buck them up electronically. (“Let’s just pause this for now,” one texts her.) Richard, a lawyer who works for the state, tells an overlong story about a colleague trying to rescue a dead poet’s memorabilia from the dumpster. If Nelson’s aim is to replicate the tedium of Corona-era discourse, he has done so expertly, trusting in the married actors Jay O. Sanders (as Richard) and Maryann Plunkett (as Barbara) to create profound sibling portraits from sub-dramatic dialogue.
It makes some sense that the political agony of the country, so key to the previous plays as a counterweight to their apparently narrow concerns, is buried more deeply now. The emotional effects of the epidemic are paramount here, as they are in many families. Not having “touched another human being for over three months,” Marian (Laila Robins) has taken to gardening in short shorts and halter tops to attract the attention of a passer-by who is either a “gentleman caller” or a stalker.
Meanwhile — the adverb seems especially apt in a story like this — Jane (Sally Murphy) is dreading further disruption of her straitened Rhinebeck life; joining the call by Zoom from his ex-wife’s apartment in Brooklyn, Tim (Stephen Kunken) informs her and the others that he may have to bring his 18-year-old daughter — and the daughter’s friend, whose parents are abusive — to live with them. No one, not even the frightened teenager, wants that, yet once again the family is being buffeted by forces seemingly extraneous to them.
It’s that seeming extraneousness that leaves me slightly less satisfied with “And So We Come Forth” than I was with any previous Apple iteration. An epidemic does not make a very good antagonist, at least in a family where everyone is now well and in a state that has flattened the curve. The way the family wrangles with it, without regard to its more devastating effects elsewhere, does not tell us much, as all the other plays have done, about what the struggle to be good Americans means.
The switch to Zoom, while enhancing the feeling of appointment TV, and doing no harm to the excellence of production, has thus underlined the feeling that the Apples, as subjects of dramatic inquiry, have come unmoored from the world the rest of us live in. It is, after all, on social media, on phones and apps, that the most profound questions of our day are being addressed in real time.
“And So We Come Forth” — the title comes from Dante’s “Inferno” — seems to swerve from those questions, even as it embraces their medium. The play, about a white family in a town that is nearly 90 percent white as well, alludes to Black Lives Matter only once and only indirectly, in an amusing anecdote about the siblings’ grandmother walking through Harlem in the 1970s. It’s telling but, at least for me, not telling enough.
Nelson implicitly argues against that sort of litmus-test critique in the way he questions but ultimately defends the value of literature, dramatic or otherwise. He admits into evidence, in his typical second-cousin-once-removed style, an email from a friend of the Apples, a Russian-born professor who now finds Proust “useless and dated” and Faulkner no longer worthy of curiosity. She blames the internet for having ruined discourse with its Soviet-style oversight, its relentless spies “hoping to catch an awkward word or phrase and report it to authorities.”
True enough — and an Apple episode that hit that theme squarely might be quite thrilling. (Richard gets canceled? Jane gets doxxed?) This one, lovely as it is, and despite being a benefit for the Actors Fund, cannot resolve the contradiction between the faith in humanism that has animated the series thus far and the facts on the ground.
Seemingly admitting that, it sends us off with an aria from “Così Fan Tutte” — “Soave sia il vento” — as if to reassert, on the evidence of Mozart, the healing or at least the distracting power of art.
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