Illyria

Last season, Richard Nelson's Gabriel Family trilogy was a comforting beacon in a traumatic time. Watching the tight-knit Rhinebeck family mourn their dead, contemplate their future, prepare homey meals around a beaten wooden table, and talk--wearily, anxiously--about American politics in the months leading up to the presidential election felt weirdly, sadly comforting: these fictive people, like the real ones I sit amongst, have had the rug ripped out from them, but here we all are, strong and clear-eyed, together. I'm forever grateful to Nelson for that cycle, which made me a fan. So when the Public announced that it had commissioned Illyria, a Nelson play about the Public Theater in its very earliest days, I snapped up tickets as soon as they became available.

Joan Marcus

I suppose I needn't have been so hasty. Even though the Public is giving some of the tickets to Illyria away free in the lobby 90 minutes prior to every performance, the house during the performance I saw was about 3/4 full. I guess this is why I feel compelled to mention the obvious every time I write about him: Richard Nelson's plays are really, really, really just not for everyone.

They work for me, though. Illyria might not feel like quite the lifeline the Gabriel plays were a year ago, but I found it to be similarly comforting and moving just the same. Maybe it's the presence of more beaten wooden tables, or the food that inevitably appears atop them. Or maybe it's that the pretty ordinary-seeming men and women who debate, fight, plan, and kibbitz while sitting around those tables are all at least partly responsible for the beloved institution Nelson often writes (and directs) for in the first place.

Set in 1958, well before the Public was ensconced in its current home at 425 Lafayette Street and only shortly after its mobile stage unit broke down on the lawn beneath Belvedere Castle, Illyria depicts the organization's very early history without ever coming off too much like a Wikipedia page. Conversation, typically ultra-natural, steers clear of obvious exposition (one or two exceptions--"remember how we met? With that show at that time in that place? My, that was swell"--clash pretty clearly with the rest of the dialogue). Still, the play manages enough detail for audience members who know very little about Papp or the Public to make sense of what's going on. We learn, for example, that Papp (John Magaro) is stubborn, controlling and not an especially effusive or attentive family man (Kristen Connolly plays Peggy, the second of his four wives). We learn that he has recently been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and fired from his day job at CBS (not mentioned in the play: he entered arbitration to get the job back just so he could quit, because he was hilariously oppositional and thus a total badass). And we learn how singularly obsessed he is with realizing his vision of bringing free theater to the people of New York City.

Of course, we also learn about the Public in the process: its scrappy origins and its near-desperate reliance on up-and-coming white-hot talent like Colleen Dewhurst (Rosie Benton) and George C. Scott (never depicted, but drunk as a lord nonetheless). We meet some of its earliest champions; Emma Duncan and John Sanders are Gladys and Stuart Vaughan, Papp's first assistant and go-to director, respectively; their marriage is even more obviously doomed than Papp's is to Peggy. And we get plenty about just how rootless the organization is, and how shaky it is financially.

It's no spoiler to note that it all works out okay in the end, if not for any of the couples then most certainly for the Public. Nelson leaves Illyria's characters, tipsy and taking a moment to celebrate the closing of Twelfth Night, sitting together  and passing a flask on a rainy lawn in Central Park--strong and clear-eyed, together--at the site of what will eventually become the Delacorte Theater. Fifty years later, the story of the Public is still unfolding

The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Women of a Certain Age

Joan Marcus

Joan Marcus

In very dark times, I'm always telling my students, people crave the comfort-food version of mass entertainment: breezy movies, bubbly Broadway shows, silly TV sit-coms, trashy romance novels. But lately, I've been disproving my own axiom. For the first time I can think of, at least in my life, the news has been so relentlessly, sloggingly bad, and the state of the country so brutally disillusioning, that somehow, easy escapism just isn't doing it for me. A very large portion of the country is going through in a period of collective mourning that I somehow feel the need to remain ever alert and connected to. Tuning out completely, while certainly tempting, feels cheap, at least for right now. I'm envious of those who can do it, but I haven't felt completely safe in totally blotting the world out. Somehow, remaining connected to the problems plaguing the country, while at the same time seeking solace in diversions that allow me to sort of tune out halfway, is where it's at for me these days. So I thought I'd weigh in about two shows that recently worked for me, despite--or perhaps because--of their heavy themes and underlying sadness.

What Did You Expect?

In Richard Nelson's Hungry, which ran at the Public last spring, the Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, had just finished scattering the ashes of their brother / husband / ex-husband / son / brother-in-law Thomas on the shores of the Hudson River. Six months have passed between then and now, and here the Gabriels are, again sprawled around the same table in the family homestead where Thomas lived until his death with his third wife, Mary, who continues to hold down the fort. This time preoccupied with prepping both dinner and a picnic planned for tomorrow, the Gabriels chop and mix and stir while chatting about a wide range of subjects, ranging from old family stories to whether the potato salad needs more mustard to national politics to financial concerns to whether or not they should open another bottle of wine. In short, What Did You Expect? finds the Gabriels more or less the same as we left them at the end of Hungry, if perhaps more tired, more anxious, a little sadder.

Can you blame them, really, given the state of the world right now? What did you expect, indeed?

Joan Marcus

I'll admit it: As moved and impressed as I was by Hungry, and as eager as I was to get tickets to the second and third installments of Nelson's sold-out cycle about the Gabriel family, I found that I wasn't particularly eager to see What Did You Expect? once showtime came around. Lord knows we've all had a long, unpleasant, exceedingly rocky six months of news that's ranged from bad to worse to hide-under-the-bed-and-hyperventilate awful; by showtime, the prospect of sitting and watching a middle-class American family sitting and talking--about politics, no less!--came to seem more psychically exhausting than I felt I could handle. I was wrong, of course, just as I was wrong in assuming, prior to seeing Hungry, that watching people talk and make dinner would put me to sleep.

Nelson's process, which you can learn more about here, makes for remarkably up-to-date theater; in rehearsals and being frantically rewritten up until opening night, What Did You Expect? was frozen on September 16th, and takes place just prior to the first presidential debate. But the Gabriels' conversation goes no deeper into politics than your average American family's does, and this turns out to be both curiously reassuring and precisely the point. The Gabriels are certainly concerned about the upcoming election, but they're also preoccupied by a multitude of other matters, all of which are discussed at length, if never neatly, stagily, artificially resolved.

Hungry

The Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, has just finished scattering the ashes of Thomas, one of its men, on the shores of the Hudson. Now that the simple ceremony has ended, they have retreated to the house Thomas shared with his third wife, Mary. Together, they gather around Mary's large wooden table to reminisce, mourn, catch up, listen to music, and set about preparing a nice dinner for themselves. Bread dough is kneaded and popped into the oven; vegetables for ratatouille are peeled, chopped, tossed in olive oil, and set on a burner; apples are peeled, chopped, and tossed in lemon juice for a crumble; bottles of red and white wine are poured. The family members chat in the sort of wide-ranging and amiable, ambling way people who are comfortable with one another tend to: one topic segues easily into another, doubles back, segues again. There are things someone wants to push further and things someone doesn't want to talk about; there are digressions and thoughtful pauses and reiterations. No topic is especially revelatory or unique; there are no Big Dramatic Moments or Deep Secrets That Get Revealed. Instead, topics include exactly the sort you'd expect people to discuss while they're sitting around shooting the shit for a while at a gathering: interfamily dynamics, work, local and national politics, Hillary and Donald and feeling the Bern, what old friends and acquaintances have been up to, how to properly chop the vegetables, the good old days, the way things have been changing around these parts. When dinner is ready, the family retreats from the kitchen into the dining room to eat, and that's when the play ends; only the faint smell of freshly baked bread remains.

Joan Marcus

"Yeah, but how is that a play?" my husband asked when I arrived home to tell him about Hungry, Richard Nelson's beautifully acted first installment in a planned trilogy--collectively titled "Election Year in the Life of One Family"--about the Gabriels. If you agree with his reaction, I'd strongly recommend that you skip this one--and the two Gabriel family plays to follow at the Public this September and November. But if the chance to be a fly on the wall in the kitchen of a fairly typical white, middle-class, contemporary American family appeals to you, Hungry will satisfy your soul.

I'd never before seen a Richard Nelson play, but his reputation preceeds him. I knew that he'd done a series of plays like this before--his four so-called Apple family plays, written between 2010 and 1013, focused on the fictional Apple family, also from Rhinebeck, during important moments in contemporary American politics. And I knew that many of my friends and colleagues, all avid theatergoers whose wide-ranging tastes I trust and respect, find Nelson's plays to be indulgent, pointless, boring wastes of time. I was fully prepared to feel much the same way, and am, frankly, still a little surprised that I didn't.

Hungry is slow and ruminative, for sure--it's not paced like most plays are, which is to say that nothing really happens except chat and chopping and kitchen work. But I found myself mesmerized by this small, quiet play, which was so expertly, realistically and convincingly directed by the playwright and performed by an almost all-female, universally strong, cast of six: Mary Ann Plunkett, Roberta Maxwell, Jay O. Sanders, Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, and Meg Gibson. There is something beautiful about a quiet, unspoken celebration of so-called "women's work," and the peaceful synchronicity that results from it.

Watching people sitting around and chatting for almost two hours is most certainly not for everyone, and I came away from Hungry keenly aware of the reasons why Nelson's plays tend to be very mixed, reception-wise. If, and only if, what I've described above appeals to you, I'd recommend this one; if it doesn't, you'll likely be bored to tears. Me? I came away feeling real affection for the Gabriel family. I am looking forward to visiting with them again when the next two plays open, and the 2016 presidential election looms ever larger.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a curious craving for ratatouille and fresh bread.