The plot of Hungry, the latest drama from the playwright Richard Nelson, could be scribbled on a sticky note. “A meal is cooked,” Nelson explained over the phone from his home in upstate New York. “And when the meal is cooked, the play is over.”
Yet Hungry, which opened on 4 March at the Public Theater in New York and is the first in a planned trilogy similar to his recent Apple Family plays, is also a startlingly incisive political drama – one that reflects and refracts the anxieties of liberal America, even as a middle-class family does nothing more than prepare a dinner of ratatouille, fresh bread, salad and an apple crisp. (That the production doesn’t then share the meal with the audience has been a source of minor discontent – the smell of that bread is tauntingly delectable.)
The Apple plays, which opened in 2010, describe four siblings – two teachers, a lawyer, a writer – who gradually move from New York City to Rhinebeck, the same quaint upstate New York town that Nelson has inhabited since 1982. Hungry looks a lot like the Apple plays, intentionally so. The setting is familiar, so is the tone, so are two of the actors. Yet Nelson believes that “details are everything and the details should tell huge and deep and different stories”.
Hungry and the two plays to follow, What Did You Expect and Women of a Certain Age, encompass The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, a trilogy about a different clan of longtime Rhinebeck residents. The subsequent two plays will debut over the next seven months, with the last opening on election night later this year.
A writer with a résumé that encompasses half a century, Nelson wrote his first play as a theatre-mad adolescent. His career encompasses radio plays in Philadelphia, sweeping historical works for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a Tony-winning book for the musical version of The Dead, and the Apple and Gabriel plays – these recent, achingly intimate pieces.
Premiering seven plays in seven years is no easy feat, even for a prolific writer. The acute contemporaneity of each play, which is set on the night that it opens, and the political discussions each includes mean that Nelson was and is in a state of constant revision.
“It’s very scary,” he said. “You wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What are you doing?’ That’s very frightening. At the same time it’s very exhilarating and makes you feel extremely alive.”
Hungry underwent considerable changes just before its opening. Comments about Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio had to be excised once their candidacies were suspended and lines about Megyn Kelly added after what Nelson termed, “a rather infamous debate, a Republican debate that was incredibly mean and nasty”. He has drafts of the next two plays prepared and he will adjust them as the political climate alters.
Already there have been turnabouts that he never could have predicted when he began work on the Gabriel plays, most particularly the sustained and somewhat baffling rise of Donald Trump. “I had conversations just three months ago where people said he doesn’t even want to be president. This is just about improving his brand and making more money,” said Nelson. “We didn’t take him seriously.”
Is he interested in a Trump candidacy or a Trump presidency? Surely a character so outlandish is a gift to any writer. “I’m a citizen before I’m a writer,” he said. “I don’t think I’m looking for gifts in that way.” In fact, the emotions around Trump run so hot, that Nelson has restricted himself to only one use of his name, very early on in Hungry.
Because his plays depend on it, he is following this election cycle closely and observed that it feels “more chaotic” than the last one. As one character in Hungry says, perhaps echoing his own thoughts: “We are so damn confused right now.”
He won’t say whom he’ll vote for in the primaries, though he confirmed that both of his adult daughters are Bernie Sanders supporters. Writing, he said, has helped him face the polls and debates with greater equanimity. “I can invest my thoughts and anxieties or questions,” he said. “I’m able to find an outlet for them in a way that’s not shouting or getting upset or getting red in the face. So these plays have been very helpful for that. It’s therapy.”
Though the conversations in the Apple plays and in the Gabriel plays all revolve around politics he isn’t sure he would call these plays political. He has strong opinions about what constitutes a political play at all. The works of Tony Kushner make the cut. “I think he tries to change things by his writing,” said Nelson. But Hamilton, a musical that he loves, doesn’t. “Not sure I’d call it a ‘political play’. It’s a generous, big-hearted, spirited inclusion play.”
The aims of his own plays are, he said, ultimately social rather than political. “They don’t hope to change anything,” he said. “They are descriptive and for me that is enough.” Yet he trusts that the act of watching them – of hearing these voices, of smelling that bread, of breathing the same air as the bodies onstage – will help to remind us about the importance of relating to one another, intimately and immediately.
“The heart of theatre is human being with human being,” he wrote in a follow-up email. Trying to convey the ineffable, indescribable complexity of that, all in the course of preparing one modest dinner, is his goal.
Hungry, the first play in The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family runs until April 3 at The Public Theater in New York City
