At the time of their respective premieres, I wrote and published an author’s note for each of the four Apple Family plays. The following are edited versions of these four notes. Together, I think, they reflect some of my process and my thinking while writing this series.
THAT HOPEY CHANGEY THING
(Written for the Opening on November 2, 2010)
I suppose this is what might be called a “disposable” play. That is one so completely tied to a very specific time, that its references and even concerns are certain to be soon out of date. I accept that.
Hopefully this in no way diminishes the ambition of the play or implies that I have taken less care over it than any other. What it hopefully reflects is this ambition: to directly engage as a playwright, that is, as a writer who expresses himself via live people in front of live people, with the politics of my country in the present time.
We have become used to viewing our politics and our political landscape through the lens of journalists or commentators or, now, comedians. Their observations are certainly invaluable to us and the very best of them struggle valiantly to be a check on vanity, arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. However, what has been missing from our public political forum is the individual’s voice. There always seems to be someone or something ready to speak for us: organizations, lobbyists, politicians, talk-show hosts and the like; but the voice I hear in my own living room, or on a train, or over dinners at a restaurant, or in my own head, I do not hear anywhere else.
This is not to say that I’ve become so deluded as to have crowned myself the public voice for anyone. My ambition remains much simpler: to put the most complex, complicated people I can on stage and to let them talk about their country today.
SWEET AND SAD
(Written for the Opening on September 11, 2011)
I have begun to wonder or fantasize that after the (imagined) four plays of this series are completed, that there might be something in putting them all together into one very long evening; the hope being that the very specificity of the plays combined with the overriding arc of them covering the same people over several years, might tell a rich and compelling story. So instead of feeling dated or “disposable,” the plays, as a whole, might just feel true. We’ll see. As I say, it might all be a fantasy.
But what I do know is that writing these plays, which are so incredibly specific in time and place, has been liberating for this writer. I feel I have found a way to address my questions of our society/culture/time/politics that derives not from ideas or (god help us) an ideology, but rather from human beings talking to human beings.
The theater has a unique place in the history of societies. After all, the theater is the only artistic form that uses the entire live human being as its expression, and, hence, carries within itself a very specific view of the world; and that view, in a word, is humanistic. The individual is at the center of the play, and the world of the play revolves around the individual—that is simply what a play is. By a play’s very nature, the heart of any play is the individual voices of its characters. And in times like our own, when human voices seem more disembodied than ever, where words seem pulled from their meanings and turned into rants and weapons, the theater can, I believe, be a necessary home for human talk; that is, a place where human beings talk about their worries, confusions, fears and loves. And where they also listen.
So in one sense then, I’m hoping that these are plays about the need to talk, the need to listen, and the need for theater.
SORRY
(Written for the Opening on November 6, 2012)
This is now the third play with the same characters on the same set (only Tim is absent here). But what is not immediately apparent reading the play is that this is the third play with the same actors playing the same characters on the same set. As I have also directed these plays, I have to say what a unique experience this has been; often on the first day of rehearsal, actors are just getting to know each other, and the long journey of making an ensemble begins. Here, on the first day, they are not just an ensemble, but like a real family. And, this writer has begun to cross a line between writing characters and uncovering people who he sees before him. In other words, I have now begun to use the personalities, the complexities, the confusions of the people who are acting in these plays to help me probe the depth of the characters themselves.
Earlier this year I opened a play called Farewell to the Theatre in London; its central character is the playwright, director, actor, theater visionary Harley Granville Barker. In that play I have Barker speak words he wrote in his essay “The Heritage of the Actor”:
One is tempted to imagine a play—to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle—from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist.
I’m learning more and more that this is an ambition of these Apple Family plays; to put characters in a room with an audience, who then can watch them be. To where the private thoughts of the characters, derived often from the very actors playing them, work to make the relation between actor and audience as intimate as relations in real life. To let the audience not only share the same space, but find themselves inside the characters’ minds. In other words, to create “the relation by which all important human intimacies exist.”
And so as I wrote in the note to Sweet and Sad: “It is my hope that these plays are about the need to talk, the need to listen, the need for theater,” and, I now add, the need to be in the same room together.
REGULAR SINGING
(Written for the Opening on November 22, 2013)
When I began this series, I wrote about how I felt it was quite likely that these plays would end up “disposable.” Perhaps foolishly and with a certain amount of hubris, I have come to think or at least hope that the plays might have a somewhat longer shelf life and, when experienced as a group over two or four days, might even add up to something greater than its parts. We can soon see. Surrounding the opening of Regular Singing, the other three plays will be remounted with the same cast.
In notes for the earlier plays, I have yet to mention two very important ways in which these plays have come about. Each of the plays has been commissioned by Oskar Eustis and The Public Theater, and in each case I was given an opening date before a word of the play had been written. Such confidence in a writer is very rare. And I am grateful. I have also yet to mention that most every Saturday night over the past many years a small group of friends has spent a few hours in my living room, talking—about life, themselves, their hopes, their art, their jobs and parents and families, what they have been reading and seeing, and, of course, about their country. The Apple Family plays originate from those Saturday nights.
In my note for Sorry I wrote that: “It is my hope that these plays are about the need to talk, the need to listen, the need for theater, and the need to be in the same room together.”
Maybe it’s just saying the same thing another way, but after completing Regular Singing, I want to add that I hope that these plays are also about the need to know, in small and even some bigger ways, that we are not alone.
Richard Nelson
Rhinebeck, New York