‘We’re all on constantly shifting sands’: the play capturing life during the US midterm elections

Playwright Richard Nelson has brought back the Apple family, the fictional Rhinebeck, New York, household at the center of his long-running Rhinebeck Panorama series, for We'll See, now at The Public Theater. Set on the night of the midterm elections as the characters wait for results, it is the first Apple play since 2020 and reflects a country Nelson describes through ordinary people rather than political leaders, according to The Guardian.

Nelson originally planned just four plays, staged each November from 2010 to 2013. A theater director from Berlin's Schaubühne saw them at the Public in 2013 and urged him to take them abroad, and the reaction convinced Nelson that specificity makes work resonate widely. Television broadcasts, international tours, two additional family cycles and a Zoom trilogy early in the Covid shutdown followed.

The new work draws on Nelson's notebooks and recent time in Paris, Kyiv and London. Characters discuss local ICE raids, a Ukrainian actor who met both kindness and xenophobia in New York, and aging, retirement, cancer and downsizing. Nelson criticizes the Maga version of American exceptionalism as perverse, while saying people should still cherish what is good about their country.

Summarized by PolitiKool from The Guardian’s reporting. Read the full story at The Guardian →