For those who know them, the Apple siblings are back again. For initiates, they are three sisters and a brother at the centre of Richard Nelson’s quartet of plays who have previously met at anniversaries and elections to break bread and talk about their lives.
This one hour reunion is different in its form, not taking place on stage around a table in Rhinebeck, New York, as it has done before, but in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic on an unspecified day in April when they congregate on a Zoom call to talk about life in lockdown.
Filmed live on Zoom by the Public Theater, the off-Broadway venue that debuted all four of Nelson’s Apple family plays between 2010 and 2013, it will doubtless carry more emotional resonance for those who know the characters already, although there is a cumulative force to the drama and it is worth watching for the performances alone.
Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), a teacher, has just returned from hospital after being critically ill. Richard (Jay O Sanders), who works for New York governor Andrew Cuomo, has temporarily moved in with her. Jane (Sally Murphy) is a divorcee but still lives with her ex-husband, Tim (Stephen Kunken), who is also on the video call and isolating in a separate room and there is Marian (Laila Robins), who is the quietest of them all.
They all appear in gallery view and their concerns reflect who they are – white, middle-class Americans in midlife. They talk about the ardour of shopping in a pandemic and the joy of finding their favourite peanut butter still stocked on the shelf. They gripe and moan but are aware of their privilege (“There are so many people who can’t stay at home like us”). They worry about the future of theatre (“People will need to sit together sometime”) and speak of the distrust between the young and old sparked by the crisis.
It is familiar fare but the formless flow of conversation achieves a deep sense of intimacy and warmth between them. It is clear that these are five people who know each other inside out and the actors perfect the tics of siblings, from eyeball-rolling irritation to unspoken affection, competition and concern.
In his introduction to the drama, the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, speaks about “the need to talk [and] the need to listen” in our time. The siblings listen to each other perhaps too emphatically – no one interrupts or talks over the other as the rowdier Lyons siblings so often do in their group chats in the TV drama, Years and Years.
There is a dramatic shift when Barbara mentions the Decameron, the 14th- century text about storytelling in a time of the Black Death. They begin to tell stories to distract each other from their own 21st-century plague and these vignettes take us beyond the quotidian life that has come before to hold us rapt, from Jane’s discovery of a forgotten female writer’s manuscript to Tim’s revisionist reading of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. It is a shame when these stories wind back down to small talk.
If there is a rub, it comes in the drama’s strength in distilling ordinary life. Much of the conversation feels like our own everyday ruminations, which leaves little distance between the Apples and us, and between drama and reality.
But it has a nascent Netflix series feel and it would be easy to become addicted to these sometimes melancholy, sometimes uplifting chunks of American life were Nelson to write his Zoom quartet.
