ACTION SNAPSHOTS IN AN APPLE HARVEST
Commissioned by New York’s Public Theatre, the four-part saga Apple Family Plays by the prolific Richard Nelson is a remarkable effort to preserve the present. Spanning the first four years of this decade, these very topical and time-sensitive one-acts are actual’”rather than virtual’”time capsules, detailing the ups and downs of a highly specific family living in the vintage bucolic town of Rhinebeck, New York (a place that The New York Times called “the town that time forgot”). Taking on a telling task, Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre is producing the first and third dramas in Nelson’s ambitious slice of Americana. Louis Contey’s omnicompetent stagings of That Hopey Changey Thing and Sorry (playing in rep; reviewed separately) give these recent “reclamations” of 2010 and 2012 their full due.
Set on the mid-term election night of Tuesday, November 2, 2010 and running 95 minutes, That Hopey Changey Thing (the title a derisive epithet from know-nothing Sarah Palin) does indeed traffic in hope and change, but domestically, where they’re easier to measure and harder to hide. In this very political, parentless household (the father has run away and the mother is dead), high-school English teacher Barbara Apple (Janet Ulrich Brooks, concealing a lot and giving away even more) lives with her increasingly demented uncle Benjamin (the legendary Mike Nussbaum). Following a heart attack, Benjamin went into a coma, escaping it into a fog of forgetfulness. Haunted by himself, this former actor has been freed from remembering what he never needed to know by his “willed amnesia,” even though it’s an endless challenge for his devoted spinster niece.
Also a teacher residing in Duchess County, Barbara’s sister Marian (vibrant Juliet Hart) is the most liberal of this clan, which triggers forensic sparring with her conservative brother Richard (David Parkes, tart and wry), a Manhattan lawyer in the State Attorney General’s Office: He leans right and loathes the Empire State’s Democrats (Cuomo and Schumer) but likes the challenger Gillibrand.
Finally, also from N.Y.C., youngest sister Jane (a mercurial Mechelle Moe), a non-fiction writer now separating from her husband, has brought along her new lover Tim Andrews (PJ Powers, a TimeLine treasure). This eager actor instantly bonds with his fellow thespian Benjamin whose brain awakens to the promises of his profession. Jane is writing a book, not unlike these plays, about “what’s underneath” the mores and evasions that make up’”and sometimes disrupt’”an organic and evolving cluster of relations called a “family.” She’s combing diverse sources to show how Americans use manners to hide secrets: Citing the old custom of “bundling” (where strangers of both sexes would sleep together for warmth), she argues that, by process of elimination, co-habiting generations discover what works, what hurts, what’s love, and what’s not. That’s just what Nelson makes us feel.
Having assembled these fractious loved ones, Nelson employs Clifford Odets-sharp details to evoke them fully: With compassion and conviction, he exposes the Apples’ complex family dynamics, shared experiences, self-sustaining gossip, self-fulfilling fears and aspirations, reflexive habits, and signature traditions (such as singing together) that divide and define them.
Over fast-moving blackout scenes that will resonate with your own recollections, this WASP sextet eat dinner and talk’”about Richard’s surrender to reactionary Republican resentment, Obama as sinned against and sinning, the Tea Party threat to common sense and decency, the new dog that’s not toilet-trained and the old dog that Benjamin thinks is still alive, parentage questions, the self-creation that erupts when actors morph into new roles, the poison of unlimited and unaccountable campaign financing, and the mess in Albany.
There’s also a fascinating fantasy: Barbara imagines that the thousands lost on 9/11 didn’t die: They’re “apparitions,” like those in Euripides’ Helen, meant to challenge our courage and capacity to defend ideals under attack. The Apples sadly agree: America has failed the test, the plentiful proof the countless corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan and our perverse penchant for abandoning freedom for security.
Hope and change indeed, thorns and roses intermixed’”that’s the discursive heart of these seemingly spontaneous, free-form snapshots from an ongoing family album. (It’s so specifically 2010 you wonder how long a shelf life this play can expect; Nelson is right to call it a “disposable” play.)
The plot, of course, is the people. Nelson makes us eavesdroppers on these unrotten Apples, tenderly depicting their once and future flaws, the standards they exact or derive from each other, and the cumulative truth from apparent discord and denial. It’s all marvelously mirrored in Brian Sidney Bembridge’s picture- and period-perfect dining room. Contey’s six players give realism a new lease on life.
photos by Lara Goetsch
That Hopey Changey Thing
TimeLine Theatre
615 W. Wellington Ave.
click here for specific dates
plays in rep with Sorry thru April 19, 2015
for tickets, call 773.281.8463 or visit www.timelinetheatre.com
for more info on Chicago Theater, visit www.TheatreinChicago.com
