A trilogy of plays tracking the lives of a family during key moments of last year’s turbulent US election are to get their UK premiere in May.
Organisers of the Brighton festival announced that The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, by the playwright Richard Nelson, would be one of the highlights in the 2017 programme.
The full programme will be revealed next month, but this week’s inauguration of Donald Trump as president seemed an opportune moment to announce the Nelson plays.
The plays follow a fictional liberal family called the Gabriels who live in Rhinebeck, Nelson’s real home in rural upstate New York and a quaint place that is being rapidly gentrified, becoming a weekend and summer home for the wealthy.
Each play premiered on the day it was set, the first on Super Tuesday in March last year, the second in September and the third on election day itself, when it was set between 5pm and 7pm so the outcome was still unknown to the characters.
Nelson said he tried to make them as topical as he could. “Each time I’ve tried to make the plays immediate so I would continue to tweak and add and modify right up until the day of the opening and then the plays are set, they are what they are.”
The plays are American but have a universality. Each is set around the family’s meal preparation, with characters discussing art, culture, politics, money and issues such as how to take care of an elderly relative or the fear of being left behind.
“If I’m trying to make any point whatsoever it is that the individual, personal, familial, and one’s artistic ambitions or economic situation and the political are all entwined and all of them make up who we are,” said Nelson.
“My country is perceived, probably now more than ever, in rather broad strokes and to see individuals really questioning things, not in a partisan, argumentative way... just questioning around a kitchen table, that is a good thing for people to see.”
The Gabriels, which premiered at New York’s Public Theater, are a follow-up to Nelson’s The Apple Family Plays, four plays presented at the 2015 edition of Brighton festival that proved to be that year’s theatrical highlight.
Nelson said it was exciting to be back. “We had a wonderful time when we came to Brighton two years ago and we’re very much looking forward to it again. I spent a great deal of my career in England so I made a lot of friends and I’m looking forward to showing my work to my friends.”
The plays, Hungry, What Did You Expect? and Women of a Certain Age, will be performed individually over three nights, and on three days they will be performed as marathons, one after the other.
• Brighton festival runs 6-28 May.
