More Script Reports I

[In the fall of 1986, as a member of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now “. . . of the Americas”), I was part of a team of script readers for the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships for American Playwrights Program, 1987 Competition.  The project is now defunct, but it was a program for regional theaters to apply for grants to subsidize a residency for a mid-career playwright of their choosing. 

[The Rockefeller Foundation had contacted LMDA, whose president at the time was Cynthia Jenner, who’d been a teacher of mine in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.  Cynthia put together a team of LMDA members to serve as the first level of screening for the grant competition. 

[We read the scripts submitted by the theaters in support of their nominees for the residency and passed on our evaluations to the distinguished panel, the members of which weren’t known to us, who’d make the final selections of the grant awards.

[Each of us readers read scripts passed to us randomly, each of us reading a dozen or more.  We might be reading a typescript or even a published text, and we might be the first reader or a second or third reader.  We had to write up an evaluation using a form for the RF competition—I think Cynthia devised the form—so that we all responded to the same areas of interest. 

[This first group of script evals below are all for playwrights whose names are known in theater circles.  That was more likely in the RF competition than in other reading stints I did because the grant was for mid-career writers, so they already had track records.  Later collections, if I continue to post these vintage reports, will include many writers whose work is not familiar to ROTters.

[One word of warning: these reports were never intended for public consumption; these were in-house documents.  In order to be as brief and succinct as possible, some of what we said, as you’ll notice below, might sound harsh and even insulting.  I’m afraid that’s how this end of the business works.

[I’ve posted other script reports on Rick On Theater in the past.  “Two Script Reports” appeared on 20 February 2020, three evaluations were part of my post on Soviet playwright Evgenii Svarts (9 March 2020), and I included my script report for Don DeLillo’s The Day Room with my performance report in “Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives,” 16 April 2020.]

--------------------

[The first script in this selection is The Wash by Philip Kan Gotanda (b. 1951), a California-based writer.  The Wash was first presented at Los Angeles's Mark Taper Forum in 1985 and made its New York City début in 1990 at the Manhattan Theater Club.  In 1988, it was filmed by Michael Toshiyuki Uno for the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse.

[Gotanda’s work has mostly been premièred in California theaters, especially Los Angeles and San Francisco, before moving to stages across the U.S. and abroad (including Japan).  He’s a third-generation Japanese-American and his writing focuses on the Asian-American experience.  His plays, however, tackle themes that transcend the ethnicity of their characters and the locales of their settings.]

PRE-SCREENING SCRIPT EVALUATION 

READER: [Rick]

DATE: 9/28/86

AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Philip Kan Gotanda 

TITLE/DATE: The Wash, 1985

GENRE/STYLE: realistic family drama

STRUCTURE: episodic (27 scenes)

SETTING: “realistic but elemental,” representing 5 locations

LANGUAGE: realistic dialogue (with a little Japanese to spice it up)

MUSIC/LYRICS: none

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 3 men, 5 women; 1 man is Hawaiian, the rest are Japanese; some knowledge of Japanese necessary for several characters 

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: ensemble cast of realistic characters

CONCEPTION: character study of a failed marriage

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: “non-ethnic” treatment of Japanese-American characters: these are just people who happen to be ethnically Japanese.  The play has warmth and compassion, though it’s unspectacular

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

__________________________________________________________

Nobu and Masi have separated some time before, though Masi still picks up her ex-husband’s dirty laundry and delivers his clean clothes.  Both are seeing new people, though Masi is getting more serious than Nobu.  Encouraged by her daughters, Masi asks for a divorce so she can remarry.  Nobu at first reacts violently, but finally acquiesces.  There is a minor subplot dealing with Nobu’s estrangement from his youngest daughter, who married a black American, and her infant son.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: This play is not spectacular or particularly innovative theatrically, but it is touching and engaging.  Part of the script was missing, so I was unable to give it a full evaluation, as the ending got confusing because of missing scenes, but Gotanda has created an interesting situation with believable characters.  The work is solid and well structured, and shows the marks of a disciplined and talented playwright. 

Most important, in my estimation, is the material Gotanda is working with.  He is writing about the Japanese-American community, but in a way that is accessible to both Japanese and westerners.  It took the black theater in this country a decade or more to begin creating this kind of play about black Americans.  This is a writer who ought to be encouraged and supported in his work to bridge the culture gap.  In time, I feel he will certainly write theatrically more interesting plays.

RECOMMENDATION: 

Reject                                                     ____________

Reject, but express interest in writer       ____________

Second reading                                       ____XXX____

Other                                                      ____________

*  *  *  *

[Spalding Gray (1941-2004) was a popular actor and monologist in New York City.  He started in New York City’s Downtown avant-garde theater and performance scene, becoming a member of the renowned Wooster Group theater company in Manhattan’s SoHo.  Several of his performances were filmed for theaters and television.

[In the 1980s and 1990s, Gray performed autobiographical monologues, first at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage, then other venues around the city, and finally débuting at the Lincoln Center Theatre.

[In 1986, the Acting Company, a touring company under the artistic direction of Michael Kahn, presented a program of seven one-act plays adapted from stories by Anton Chekov, each play written by a different dramatist.  Gray was commissioned to adapt The Witch, an 1886 short story about lust and loneliness.  The program, called Orchards, opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village on 22 April 1986.

[But Gray had composed a monologue he called Rivkala’s Ring, which has little to do with The Witch.  Instead, it largely resembles one of Gray’s monologues—though it was the first piece he wrote intended to be performed by someone other than himself.

[A serious car accident in 2001 left him severely injured and maimed.  Despite his success and popularity, this and the treatments for his injuries led Gray into a deep depression and in January 2004, the playwright and actor went missing.  In March, the body of Spalding Gray was found in the East River.  He is believed to have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry and drowned.]

PRE-SCREENING SCRIPT EVALUATION  

READER: [Rick]

DATE: 9/29/86

AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Spalding Gray

TITLE/DATE: Rivkala’s Ring, 1986

GENRE/STYLE: “stream-of-consciousness” storytelling

STRUCTURE: monologue

SETTING: none necessary

LANGUAGE: contemporary speech as if improvised on the spot

MUSIC/LYRICS: none

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 1 (written for a man, but possible to adjust for a woman; Gray even hints it could be)

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: monologist (it’s Spalding, whatever actor plays him; he even suggests studying one of his tapes at Lincoln Center to prepare for the piece [the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center, has a division called Theatre on Film and Tape, which holds items such as the name implies])

CONCEPTION: like most of Gray’s work, he’s making wry, off-beat observations of the world he lives in, with all his usual semi-logical twists and turns

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: seeing someone else do Spalding; the wonderful, idiosyncratic humor of the vision

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

___________________________________________________________

A synopsis isn’t possible, but it is Spalding’s thoughts and observations on the day of the arrival of the Chekhov short story he’s supposed to adapt.  His musings cover a drowned rat in the swimming pool, AIDS, a New York suicide, eating-all-you-can at the Sizzler [a nationwide steak-and-seafood chain in the ’80s and ’90s whose reputation and food deteriorated in mid-’90s] and dinner at a Japanese restaurant.  The rest must be read to be experienced; a summary won’t work.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: Evaluating Spalding Gray is very difficult.  If you’ve seen him work, it’s not necessary; if you haven’t, describing him is inadequate.  He is truly unique—an honest-to-God one-of-a-kind storyteller.  He’s usually compared to Garrison Keilor, but that’s not very accurate.  Since Gray’s material is drawn from his own life, as seen through his own odd-ball eyes, no one else can be the same.  The most that can be said is that Rivkala’s Ring, like all of Gray’s pieces, is telling, honest, revealing and insightful.  And funny—most importantly, funny.

Gray has just had his first mainstream exposure by being booked into Lincoln Center [a series of his monologues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in June, July, and August 1986].  His introduction to the jacket-and-tie set is important to theater.  Rivkala’s Ring is his first attempt to write a piece divorced from his own performances, and turn it over to another actor to play.  He’s about to embark on his first play to be performed by a company, rather than a single individual [I don’t believe this ever came to pass].  As much out of curiosity about how his work will develop in this new vein as conviction that Gray will be an important figure on the horizon of the American stage, I want to encourage and support this work.

RECOMMENDATION: 

Reject                                                     ____________

Reject, but express interest in writer       ____________

Second reading                                       ____XXX____

Other                                                      ____________

*  *  *  *

[Richard Greenberg (b. 1958), a native Long Islander and a magna cum laude Princeton grad, writes for the stage and for television and is known for his depictions of American life that uses humor to undermine the hypocrisies and prejudices of the middle-class. 

[Greenberg studied creative writing at Princeton with novelist Joyce Carol Oates and then went on to Harvard for graduate study in English and American lit.  He dropped out in 1985 when he was accepted into the Yale School of Drama's playwriting program.

[Life Under Water, a 45-minute one-act, premièred Off-Broadway at Manhattan’s Ensemble Studio Theatre on 8 May 1985 under the direction of Don Scardino with a cast of future stars.  It was later filmed for and broadcast on the PBS television program American Playhouse on 12 April 1989 with a cast comprised of Sarah Jessica Parker, Haviland Morris, Keanu Reeves, Joanna Gleason, and Stephen McHattie.

[Take Me Out, Greenberg’s 2002 Broadway play about Major League Baseball, won the 2003 Tony Award for Best Play.  He’s also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award—both for Take Me Out—and Take Me Out was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Three Days of Rain was a finalist in 1998.]

PRE-SCREENING SCRIPT EVALUATION                       
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 9/29/86

AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Richard Greenberg

TITLE/DATE: Life Under Water, 1985

GENRE/STYLE: realistic comedy w/absurd elements

STRUCTURE: episodic 1-act (16 scenes)

SETTING: suggested/fragmentary for several Long Island locations

LANGUAGE: contemporary realistic conversation w/a heightened sense of the absurdity of today’s upper-class speech

MUSIC/LYRICS: not a musical play, but several recorded songs of various pop varieties are suggested as background and bridges

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 3 women, 2 men

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: slightly absurd versions of recognizable types

CONCEPTION: the absurdity of life among the idle rich, but with a poignant touch

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: insightful look at the world of the affluent; the delicate line between comedy and touching drama; unusual characters for actors

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

___________________________________________________________

Kip cannot live with his smothering mother anymore.  He runs away from their home on the South Fork of Long Island one night while his divorced mother is out with her married lover.  Penniless and drunk, he finds Amy-Beth and Amy-Joy, who are house-and-baby-sitting.  He moves in with them and becomes involved with both women.  In the end, they all return unhappily to their respective homes.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: Life Under Water is billed and reviewed as a comedy of the modern upper class.  That’s not entirely true—or fair.  It is funny and the characters are slight exaggerations of people we all know or have heard about, but it has a very poignant side, too.  Greenberg, who writes knowingly about both the WASP affluent and their Jewish counterparts, sees the sadness in these lost and valueless souls.  What’s most impressive is that Greenberg doesn’t push too hard for either the laughs or the near-tears. 

Though I do wish I had one of Greenberg’s recent full-lengths on which to base an evaluation, I sense that he is developing both a unique sensitivity and a strong voice.  His wry view of the world he grew up in, and his way of relating it to the public seem well worth encouraging.

RECOMMENDATION: 

Reject                                                     ____________

Reject, but express interest in writer       ____________

Second reading                                       _____XXX___

Other                                                      ____________

*  *  *  *

[Richard Nelson (b. 1950) is a playwright and librettist, having written the books for the Tony Award-winning musicals James Joyce’s The Dead (with Irish composer Shaun Davey; Off-Broadway, 1999; Broadway, 2000) and the Broadway version of Chess (1988), as well as the critically acclaimed play cycle The Rhinebeck Panorama (decade-long, 12-play cycle; 2010-2021, including three play cycles: The Apple Family Plays, The Gabriels, and The Michaels).

[The four Apple Family plays, which feature a family gathering in Rhinebeck, N.Y., take place on days that happen to be of national significance.  The Gabriel trilogy is about another Rhinebeck household that theatergoers visit at three points during the 2016 election year.  The three pandemic Zoom plays revisit the Apples as they talk through collective trauma in real time.  The two-part exploration of the Michaels depicts an artistic family on the verge, then the other side, of immense loss.

[(The “Rhinebeck Panorama” is a painting by an unknown artist that provides a bird’s-eye view of London at the beginning of the 19th century [ca. 1810].  It gets its name from the town of Rhinebeck, where it was found in 1940, lining a barrel of pistols.)

[Principia Scriptoriae (1986) premièred at the Manhattan Theatre Club in April 1986.  The title is Latin for “the Principles of Scripture,” which, according to Catholic doctrine, are eight principles one must follow to interpret scripture and unveil the word of God written in the bible.  It might be interpreted, with respect to Nelson’s play, to mean the principles of writers.

[The play went on to play at the Hartford Stage in Connecticut; A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle; and The Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., among others.  In the fall of 1986, Principia Scriptoriae was presented at The Pit, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 200-seat studio theatre at the Barbican Arts Centre in London.]

PRE-SCREENING SCRIPT EVALUATION                        
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 10

AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Richard Nelson

TITLE/DATE: Principia Scriptoriae, 1986

GENRE/STYLE: realistic drama

STRUCTURE: 10 episodic scenes

SETTING: various locations, principally a prison cell, in an unnamed Latin American country; suggested realism best

LANGUAGE: heightened realistic dialogue

MUSIC/LYRICS: none

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 8 men (0 women); several speak Spanish

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: raisonneurs, each expressing an aspect of various central questions

CONCEPTION: What is the position of writers in political situations?  Is there a difference between a right-wing government that imprisons its writers and a left-wing government that imprisons its?  Practicality vs. Ideals; Careerism vs. Honor

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: the debate of the issues; the topical subject

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

__________________________________________________________

Two young writers, an American and a local man educated in England, are in prison in a fascist Latin American country for passing out leaflets.  They are tortured and interrogated, but eventually released.  15 years later, the two meet again, after the leftists have gained power and the Latin writer has become a government official.  The American has come as part of an international delegation of writers there to negotiate for the release of an older writer imprisoned for his activities on behalf of the former regime.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: Shaw called Misalliance “A Debate in One Sitting,” and that’s pretty much what Principia Scriptoriae is, except without the humor.  The play received considerable acclaim when it was produced Off-Broadway last season, and TCG’s American Theatre has chosen to publish it (July 1986), all of which suggests it is a significant work.  Then why was I so bored with it?  I found it predictable and surprisingly bloodless, for all its topical allusions and the suggested violence of the subject. 

The characters were pretty much types, sort of Moon Children meets “El Salvador” (or whatever that recent movie was titled [Salvador, released in April 1986]).  I knew what each one’s position was going to be at every turn, and the personal motivations were so shallow and obvious, I didn’t care.  Nelson is playing with a significant issue here, but for my dough, he cops out by making every character sell out in the end.  I am not impressed.

Nelson has had some successes for some time now, but I don’t really know his work except by title.  His writing here is good in terms of craft and structure, but the play takes no risks in my view.  Perhaps that’s where Nelson has to go—to a riskier level of writing.  Before I recommend him for a large award (this would be his second Rockefeller), I’d like to see him take a few theatrical chances.

RECOMMENDATION: 

Reject                                                     ____________

Reject, but express interest in writer       ____XXX____

Second reading                                       ____________

Other                                                      ____________

*  *  *  *

[Frank Chin (b. 1940) is an author and playwright who’s considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre.  Born in Berkeley, California, he grew up in Oakland’s Chinatown.  He started the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco; in 1973, it became the Asian American Theater Company.  (Many Asian-American artists were associated with AATC, including Philip Kan Gotanda.)

[The first play by an Asian-American writer to have a production by a major New York company was Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (The American Place Theatre, 1972).   It brought the author to the attention of the U.S. theater world.  Criticism of America’s racism features in many of his plays and novels and he frequently examines stereotypes of Asian Americans and traditional Chinese folklore in his work.

[Chin has often found himself in conflict not just with white authors, but other Chinese Americans, whom he considers inauthentic and pandering to white readers.  A 2005 biographical documentary is called What's Wrong with Frank Chin?

[American Peek A Boo Kabuki, World War Two And Me was first staged in Los Angeles in 1985.] 

PRE-SCREENING SCRIPT EVALUATION 
READER: [Rick]
DATE: 10/9/86

AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Frank Chin

TITLE/DATE: American Peek A Boo Kabuki, World War Two And Me, 1985

GENRE/STYLE: semi-realistic drama, with flashbacks & direct address

STRUCTURE: 3 episodic acts

SETTING: various locations in a Japanese relocation camp in Wyoming; fragmentary realism

LANGUAGE: dialogue and direct address

MUSIC/LYRICS: some characters sing American folk songs

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: ca. 19 men, 4 women, extras; most are Japanese; some doubling indicated

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: various types of Japanese-Americans, struggling against each other and the white power structure

CONCEPTION: exposing the myth of Japanese complacency in the WWII internment; the conflict of assimilation and traditional Japanese culture

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: the subject; Asian-American casting

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:

__________________________________________________________

When the Japanese community in the west was suspected of divided loyalties during World War II and interned in relocation camps, the Japanese-American establishment campaigned for going along to prove they were not pro-Japan fifth-columnists.  Many of the younger, American-born Nisei struggled against this sentiment, even violating federal laws and going to trial to “clarify their citizenship status.”  Most went to jail for their actions, betrayed by the older Niseis and the Japanese-born immigrants who were more afraid of bad publicity than being victimized.  All this is told from the viewpoint of a now-middle-aged comedian who was an 11-year-old “outsider” (he spent his first 10 years in a TB hospital, away from his family and culture) during the camp years. 

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: This play is very long, and, for my dough, doesn’t move well enough to sustain its length.  It needs severe cutting both for length and for content—there’s just too much going on.  Not that the play is very active.  It’s quite static for the most part.  It’s interesting for its history, but it isn’t dramatic or theatrical.  I sincerely doubt it will play as it now stands.  (Chin’s opening statement makes claims about this script’s theatricality/performance style that is at least inaccurate, and at most, pompous and pretentious.)

This being only Chin’s fourth play so far, I see no reason to feel pressed to give him a grant yet.  He’s had some success with two earlier plays, including having one (The Year of the Dragon) produced on PBS [Great Performances, Public Broadcasting Service, 1971; Theater in America, PBS, 1975].  On the evidence of this play, his first venture beyond his native Chinese-American culture for source material, he should be encouraged to explore his craft more before being awarded a residency grant.

RECOMMENDATION: 

Reject                                                     ____________

Reject, but express interest in writer       ____XXX____

Second reading                                       ____________

Other                                                      ____________

'That Hopey Changey Thing'

At the beginning of December, I made another visit to my mother in Bethesda, Maryland, after we spent Thanksgiving together with family in New Jersey.  Mom and a friend have a subscription to the Studio Theatre, and she and her companion picked up an extra seat for me to join them at the matinee of Richard Nelson’s That Hopey Changey Thing on Saturday, 7 December.  The Studio is presenting the regional premières of two of Nelson’s Apple Family Plays (Studio’s umbrella title for the series) in rep this season, the other play being Sweet and Sad.  (Mother and her friend had only planned to see one of the two plays, but the theater offers weekend performance schedules that allow patrons to see both in one day.)  The two-play rep began performances on 13 November (opening for reviews around 28 November) and is scheduled to end on 29 December.

The Studio Theatre, one of Washington’s premier companies (I saw Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy there in September; see my report on ROT on 5 October), winner of 67 Helen Hayes Awards, was founded in 1978 (in a disused hot dog warehouse on Church Street near its present location).  Since 2004, it makes its home in a four-theater, 14th Street building (a former car showroom redesigned by co-founder Russell Metheny, for whom one of the four theater spaces in the current home base is named) in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington’s Northwest.  The area, reclaimed several years ago from extensive decay and deterioration, has become a sort of Washington SoHo or Chelsea, well served by restaurants, boutiques, galleries, and theaters.  The theater’s founding artistic director, now retired, was Joy Zinoman whose son, Jason, is a theater writer for the New York Times.  The Studio has produced plays by Richard Nelson before, namely Principia Scriptoriae in 1989 and Tynan in 2011; The Apple Family Plays, both 100 intermissionless minutes long, are mounted in the tiny amphitheater-shaped, 187-seat Milton Theatre on the Studio’s second floor.

It turned out, though, that my visit to the Studio this time was more arduous than usual.  First of all, I had to drive since Mom’s subscription partner, who usually drives after we meet up at her apartment, ended up being ill that weekend and we went with another friend of my mother’s.  I don’t really know my way around D.C. in a car, so Mom had to navigate, and she’s not used to going from her new residence in Bethesda.  We left extra time for the drive in and for finding parking in the area which is a haven for shoppers and diners, especially on a Saturday afternoon during the holiday-shopping period, and it was a good thing we did.  It took us at least 20 minutes to find a parking space, and it was some distance from the theater.  Both Mom and her friend are elderly and the walk back was hard on them both (I had suggested leaving them off at the theater while I looked for parking, but they both refused the offer), and we managed to get to the theater with minutes to spare for the 3-o’clock curtain.  Then, someone had screwed up the extra seat, too (either the theater staff or my mother), and it wasn’t in the books when I arrived.  First, the box office gave me another seat, but that turned out to be occupied and the spare seat the house staff found me was behind everyone so badly I couldn’t see the stage and I ended up standing for the hour-and-forty-minute performance.  I could stand easily enough without disturbing anyone, being behind the last row of regular seats, but I was boxed in by a column and a railing so I couldn’t shift my weight much, and by an hour or so in, my arthritic back was aching pretty badly.  If the work hadn’t been as good as it was, I’d have been a very unhappy chappy at the end!

Playwright Richard Nelson’s first produced play was The Killing of Yablonski in 1975 at the Mark Taper Forum/Lab in Los Angeles.  The District’s renowned Arena Stage premièred his Scooping in 1977 and his first New York City première was 1978’s Conjuring an Event at the American Place Theatre.  His Broadway début was the book for Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Belasco Theatre in 1984.  Between 1989 and 1997, after a successful 1986 revival of Principia Scriptoriae, which had received mixed response in the States, six of Nelson’s plays premièred in either London or Stratford-upon-Avon at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which commissioned them, before coming to the U.S.; the author seemed better-regarded by British audiences than here for a time.  (During this period, he also wrote radio plays for the BBC for two of which he’s won Giles Cooper Awards.)  Nelson later won a 2000 Tony for his book for James Joyce's The Dead; he received two other Tony nominations (for the lyrics for The Dead and for Best Play for Two Shakespearean Actors in 1992).  Other awards include two Obies (Vienna Notes, 1979; Innovative Programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Theater Company, also 1979), a Drama Desk Award (Some Americans Abroad, 1990), an Olivier Award for Best Play (London; The Vienna Notes, 2011); and a Rockefeller Foundation Playwright-in-Residence Award for an Arena Stage residency in 1979-80.  From 2005-2008, Nelson was chairman of the playwriting department of the Yale School of Drama.  Aside from Regular Singing at the Public, he had Nikolai and the Others running at Lincoln Center Theater in May and June.  (Nelson also writes screenplays for film and TV.  His last film script was 2012’s Hyde Park on Hudson, which starred Bill Murray as FDR and began as a BBC radio play in 2009.) 

The author of some 50 plays and adaptations, the 63-year-old Nelson was born in Chicago but grew up all over the country to accommodate his father’s peripatetic work as an accounting-systems analyst and sales rep; the family settled for long stretches in Gary, Indiana, and the Philadelphia and Detroit suburbs.  The playwright and his wife moved to Manchester, England, in 1972, right after he graduated from college, and lived there for a year, traveling also to the Continent.  Since 1983, he’s lived with his family in Rhinebeck in upstate New York, where the Apple plays are set.  (The New York Times just ran an article on Nelson’s intimate use of his hometown—the dramatist’s Lafayette/Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, or Harrison, Texas—as a continuing inspiration for these plays: “Hudson Valley Town Is a Playwright’s Home and Template,” 7 November.)  As New York Times theater writer Patrick Healy observes, “[T]he search for home—and the loss of it—has been an enduring theme” for the playwright as he strives to “conjur[e] up a comfortable, intimate home in which his characters feel safe enough to express fear or regret about the wider world at a particularly unsettling moment.”  Healy mentions previous Nelson scripts that touch on this theme: Some Americans Abroad, (1989) Goodnight Children Everywhere (1997), James Joyce’s The Dead (1999), and Nikolai and the Others (2013). 

That Hopey Changey Thing is unquestionably among this group, too—as, I suspect, are the other Apple plays.  They’ve been generally critically acclaimed, but Nelson asserts that because he’s set them in places he knows so well, “that leads, I hope, to an honesty, clarity, simplicity in the writing and for the audience.”  Unlike William Faulkner’s or Horton Foote’s literary settings, Nelson’s Rhinebeck is a real place and he names real shops, buildings, and houses as locations.  Near his home, for instance, is a yellow-painted house with broken picket fences that Nelson calls “Barbara’s house.”  (The writer doesn’t know the people who live there; they aren’t models for the Apple family.)  “I literally imagine every moment of the plays somewhere in my own village,” he says.  “For me, it makes everything extremely personal.”

The origin of the Apple series, however, was somewhat unexpected, according to Studio dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel.   In New York, Public Theater artistic director, Oskar Eustis, had been unsuccessfully searching for a play about the contemporary U.S. political scene.  At a breakfast with playwright Nelson, Eustis proposed commissioning a “big-cast, big-idea political” script, “perhaps a documentary-style chronicle of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Nelson countered with an offer of “a series of intimate plays about a single family” whose members “respond to the political issues of their day in their own idiosyncratic—character-based—ways.”  The dramatist explains, “What has been missing from our political forum is the individual’s voice.”  Studio artistic director David Muse told the cast that the Apple plays are “plays about politics, but not capital-P Political Plays” and director Serge Seiden, who sees a parallel between Nelson’s work and Chekhov’s (some of which Nelson has adapted), explained, “These plays deal with the universal truths in ordinary details of living,” a notion that evokes the book Jane Apple is writing in the play. 

The Studio’s two plays about the Apple family are the first in the four-play cycle Nelson wrote about the Apple siblings (plus others) in the small, Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck in Dutchess County (about 100 miles north of New York City).  (The whole series, which the playwright began in 2010, will be presented under his own direction at New York City’s Public Theater, including the world première of the last play, Regular Singing.  Billed as The Apple Family Plays: Scenes From Life In The Country, the four plays will be performed in rep from 22 October to 15 December.)  The plays are all set in sister Barbara’s dining room in four consecutive years.  As the members and friends of the Apple family eat, we witness their tensions, compromises, affections, and resentments.  Nelson describes the Apples as “worried liberals of a certain generation,” and each play reflects how the dramatist imagines Rhinebeckers like them will respond to momentous events in the nation.  

In Hopey Changey, the first play in the cycle, it’s 7 p.m. on the evening of President Obama’s first midterm election in 2010 (2 November, the day the play opened in New York), and Barbara Apple, an unmarried high school English teacher, is hosting dinner for the family.  During the meal, the diners dig into family secrets the answers to which have been lost, the cultural significance of etiquette, and the precarious shape of American politics.  In the second installment, Sweet and Sad, a year has passed, and Barbara is serving brunch on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks (also the day the play débuted, 11 September 2011) and the family members talk about loss, memory, and ten years of change.  Uncle Benjamin, a once highly-respected classical stage actor, has amnesia from a heart attack; sister Marian, a second-grade teacher, is politically active for liberal causes and candidates (such as Andrew Cuomo and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom were running that day for election as governor and senator, respectively); and brother Richard, a lawyer who’s left state attorney general Andrew Cuomo’s office on the eve of the politician’s election to the governorship to take a job with a corporate-law firm, is moving rightward politically.  Youngest sister Jane, a writer living in Manhattan who’s taken a gig at Bard College (in nearby Annandale-on-Hudson, seven miles north of Rhinebeck along the Hudson), has brought along her new boyfriend, Tim, an actor and much younger man. 

(If you spot a pattern in the opening dates of Nelson’s Apple saga plays, you’re right.  Each play is not only focused on a moment in American political history, but each one debuted on the auspicious date on which the play is set as well.  Play number three, Sorry, is set on the morning of the 2012 election, 6 November, and that’s the day the play opened at the Public.  Regular Singing is set on 22 November 2013, the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination; it premièred on that date.  Nelson’s even been known to make changes and updates to the Apple scripts right up to opening if there’s breaking news or new commentary on the events depicted.  I’ve heard of gimmick-casting before, but this is my first encounter with gimmick-opening.  I’m not sure how much that adds to the performances themselves, especially if you don’t see the plays on the original opening nights—like I won’t be doing—but I guess it doesn’t do any harm.  Maybe it makes the theater writers perk up and compose quirkier notices, such as New York magazine reviewer Scott Brown’s remark in his notice for Sorry in 2012: “I've been trying to find words to describe what it felt like to be inside that theater as the election raged noisily outside, what it's like listening to the Apples speak to each other in inside-voices.  It was a lovely, near-religious feeling of shared citizenship, one of the things theater was invented to foster.”  Whatever . . . .)

I’ve already intimated how I felt about the presentation of Hopey Changey, so let me start there.  As I’ve always found at the Studio, the stage work, from the acting and directing to the design and tech, is top-notch.  The only artist in this production with whose work I’m familiar is Ted van Grie­thuysen, who plays the amnesiac uncle, but everyone acquits him- or herself excellently here.  (I’ve seen van Grie­thuysen as Dogberry in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Cuban-themed production of Much Ado About Nothing in 2011 and as Malvolio in STC’s Twelfth Night in 2008—both in New Year’s Eve performances.  As the winner of six Helen Hayes Awards, he’s one of Washington’s most respected actors, and deservedly so.)  I found the play a little brittle and set-up, about which I’ll say more shortly, but the staging was solid and engaging (hence my lack of choler at having to stand to see it!). 

The Milton’s small stage, a semi-circular thrust with only a back wall, was convincingly decorated to evoke the dining room of a comfortable small-town house.  Debra Booth’s set design relies on just a Scandinavian-style wooden dining table with four spoke-backed chairs, an oriental rug centered on the wood floor.  A card table is set up down stage right, covered with a table cloth, to accommodate the extra diners (the main table having been shifted up center, also covered, so that the family can eat buffet-style when they all arrive.  The chairs are scattered about because, except for the elderly Uncle Benjamin, the family and guests are expected to balance their plates on their knees.  The lone wall has a kitchen door at center, with a sliver of the kitchen visible within when the door is opened.  According to the Studio’s newsletter, there’s actually “a full-fledged kitchen” back there, even though we can’t see most of it, “to emphasize the reality of the play.”  (There’s a barking dog somewhere back there, too—a replacement for Uncle Benjamin’s beloved pet who had to be euthanized and of whom the older man can’t let go in his mind.) 

That Hopey Changey Thing opens as members of the household bring out the card table, move the dining table, drape the cloths, lay out the tableware and the food, all in silence.  Occasionally, the lights dim, accompanied by a piano chord, and everyone stops briefly (as will happen later during the dialogue scenes as well), indicating that time is passing, after which the actors take new positions and the action restarts as the set is assembled for the play itself.  I don’t know how Nelson has described this opening sequence, so it may have been his or director Seiden’s invention, but this business is carried out nearly choreographically, with many movements, such as the unfolding of the table cloths, performed in unison.  The actors barely relate to one another, and when they do, it looked to me like pro forma “recognition,” not organic, character-based interaction.  This stylization wasn’t reprised during the body of the play, so it stuck out and set up an expectation that wasn’t borne out.  (Now I’d like to see the performances directed by Nelson at the Public Theater in New York City so I can see how he staged this bit.)

Except for the surrealistic dim-outs both in the opening sequence and the later dialogue scenes, Daniel MacLean Wagner’s lighting is essentially realistic, a realistic indoor scene.  Helen Huang’s costumes are also appropriately current, precisely what I’d expect middle-aged, middle-class people to be wearing on a fall evening in 2010 in a town like Rhinebeck, a town of about 8,000 residents who resent how “New Yorkers” come to look at the locals and their habitat as if it were a theme park.  Two sisters are, after all, school teachers, the third an academic writer, and the brother a (now corporate) lawyer—these aren’t flashy people.  Casual but respectable—and that’s how they all looked (even actor Tim and former actor Benjamin).

The acting is in the same vein—no one (meaning the characters in this case) stands out, steals the focus, takes the stage (again, not even the actors in the group).  I’ve seen a lot of ensemble productions recently, and this is another in that line, and excellently executed by both the cast and the director.  I’ll say a few things about the writing in a bit, but all the actors depict a family, with all its closeness, familiarity, and fissures, who all know each other up and down, know the buttons to push (and not to, as Barbara warns Richard about Marian right at the beginning)  Uncle Benjamin is often lost, as his memory, which comes and goes, fails and Tim, the outsider in the gathering, behaves like a man who wants to make a good impression for the sake of Jane but has his own personality and thoughts—polite, without being obsequious.  (He engages Benjamin in a conversation about acting that shows what a stage master the older man must have been, and even asks Benjamin what his amnesia is like—not a topic I’d expect a guest to raise—because the young actor has a theory that “great acting is simply willed amnesia.”)  If it weren’t for politics, not a taboo subject in this family but a hot one, the Apples and their circle would be . . . well, boring.  Of course, I mean “normal,” but not many dramatists write plays about people like that.

When I see a show like this one in which the whole cast works as a unit, I often don’t single out actors by name, but this work was so good in that way, I want at least to name the performers for the record.  Brother Richard is portrayed by graying, already-paunchy Rick Foucheux as somewhat irascible and somewhat defensive (he’s leaving the family political cocoon for Republican-lite—Javits Republicanism, as he says, which his sisters point out doesn’t exist anymore); Uncle Benjamin, as I’ve already noted, is D.C. stage stalwart van Griethuysen, very convincingly in and out of focus—an active, engaged mien switching instantly to a vacant, lost gaze as he concentrates on the food on his plate; sister Barbara is played by Sarah Marshall, a matronly, soft-voiced mollifier, obviously the peacemaker among the Apples who also takes care of Benjamin—the mother-figure of the family group; sister Marian is depicted by Elizabeth Pierotti as a militant liberal who brooks no deviation from the party line and whose advice to anyone who isn’t sure how to vote just to be sure to vote for the Democrat—even if you don’t know who the candidate is; baby sister Jane is Kimberly Schraf, also the intellectual of the family who’s writing a book on manners and etiquette as a form of cultural and societal infrastructure; and Tim, the actor whom Jane has brought home to meet her family, is played by Jeremy Webb with clear avidness both to be well-received and to cultivate Benjamin whom he’d seen read Oscar Wilde some months earlier at the 92nd Street Y—Tim’s giving a performance, but a very good one that seems natural even as it’s controlled and scored.  (A note: one of the hardest roles for an actor is to play an actor.  A good actor playing a bad one is difficult, but a good actor playing a good one is even harder because the role-playing actor has to let the audience know he’s performing without the actor-as-role being obvious about it at the same time.  It’s a complete paradox—to show he’s acting without showing he’s acting!)  While each of the characters has her or his individual quirks and foibles, none of the actors displays tics or mannerisms and the cast and director Seiden have avoided histrionics and empty emotionalism, letting the feathers fly only when dramatically necessary.  As far as Nelson lets them, they turn in honest, grounded, and believable characters. 

It may be that the cast and director’s being so good at what they’re doing in Hopey Changey is why the faults in Nelson’s script show up so clearly.  (Or maybe I’m hypercritical—these plays have gotten great reviews since they began appearing, including the two in rep at the Studio.)  I broached the notion that Hopey Changey was set up, a characteristic that was most prominent at the beginning of the play, but suffused the whole script.  (I considered if this perception was caused by the performance, but I concluded that it’s endemic in Nelson’s text, though I’d be curious, again, to see how it comes out in his staging at the Public.)  What I mean is that the situation not only of the evening depicted in Hopey Changey but the whole circumstance of the Apple siblings as Nelson seems to be laying it out in the four plays is arranged.  Now, maybe it’s necessary to do that in this first script so that the others can link up logically and narratively.  (From the evidence of Hopey Changey, by the way, though it may be more satisfying to see all four plays, the coherence of one doesn’t depend on seeing the other three.  That may become less apparent in the later plays, however.)  First of all, the characters are very precisely constructed, like pieces in a puzzle, so that they can interact in the ways Nelson has worked out for them.  If, as the feminists of the ’60s and ’70s liked to insists, “the personal is political,” the first Apple Family Play (and probably all of them) is a self-conscious study in the political as personal.  Marian, for instance, is the rabid liberal/Democrat so she has to react strongly to Richard’s sliding toward conservatism.  (I have no evidence of this, but I suspect that Richard Apple, the disillusioned liberal who perceives the hollowness of the political divide, is a stand-in for Richard Nelson.  His bitterness—the nasty, vulgar jokes, the pointed remarks about Democratic politicians, the quasi defense of Sarah Palin—may be Nelson’s, or perhaps what the writer sees ahead for himself.)  The play opens with Richard delivering the very vulgar punch line to a joke about Senators Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, and Barbara even warns him not to repeat the joke to Marian when she arrives.  (He, of course, does, and it sets her off predictably.)  In addition, Richard has taken a position with a big law firm for the money, a direct contrast with his sisters—a writer and two school teachers: not professions people go into for the pay scale.  Jane is the academic and writer (though we do learn that Barbara wrote some fiction years ago) so that she can stick out in a family of pragmatists and political idealists and be the foil for their lack of understanding when she tries to explain her work, which immediately makes Barbara feel as if she’s being studied as a subject for the book.  Her study of manners as the way we reveal or hide who we are and what we really think is a reflection of what Nelson’s doing with a play about eating and communing with family.  It’s also very convenient that Tim is an actor—just like the failing Benjamin.  The characters’ personalities and interests are all very carefully established pretty quickly and definitively and they all hew to expectations for those traits. 

The situation, of course, is also made to order for family conflict: election night when the Republicans take over the House of Representatives and almost the Senate as well.  Marian is enough of the committed Democrat that she’s been poll-watching in town, making her late to the family dinner; her unseen husband is still at the polling place.  Yet Jane eventually reveals that she didn’t vote (though she would have voted for Cuomo and Gillibrand, she says), offering flimsy excuses.  On the larger canvas, Benjamin’s come-and-go memory will clearly get worse as the story advances year to year—and what could be worse for an actor than to lose his memory.  Richard will probably get more and more conservative—he’s already arguing with Marian that the Democrats are no better than the Republicans anyway—and be drawn by his new colleagues further and further into the Republican camp.  “Since when has not being worse,” he challenges Marian, “become who we are?”  Late in Hopey Changey Barbara and Marian disclose that their father had run off when they were children—Jane was too young to remember much—and that Uncle Benjamin took up the slack and looked after them, but they’ve never learned why his brother left and now that his memory is dissolving, they fear they never will.  I predict this will be a recurring topic, probably growing in importance in the succeeding plays, but it’s pretty baldly dropped into this script like a little bomb—a time bomb, I guess.  And that suggests what’s perhaps the biggest set-up of all: the play has no conclusion.  The conversation, the arguments, just stop and everyone goes home.  (These politically addicted siblings don’t even listen to the returns, though Barbara keeps suggesting that.)  It’s open-ended so the next play can dovetail from this one, and the next from that one, and so on.

I’ve only seen a few of Richard Nelson’s plays, and the only one of which I have any recollection is Some Americans Abroad, which I saw at Lincoln Center in 1990, and I have very little impression of it 23 years later, except that I found it rather dry and cold.  Obviously, Nelson never became a playwright whose work I made a point of catching, and I suggest that the reason is the sense I’ve tried to outline concerning That Hopey Changey Thing.  (By the way, the play’s title, for those who lived under a rock from 2008 through 2010, is an allusion to something Sarah Palin said in a speech on 27 March 2010, seven months before the play is set, at a Tea Party rally in Searchlight, Nevada—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown: “That bumper sticker that maybe you’ll see on the next Subaru driving by—an Obama bumper sticker—you should stop the driver and say, ‘So how is that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?’”  Palin gets a brief mention in the play, and the mockery of Obama isn’t cited, which strikes me as another kind of set-up—using a semi-recognizable line that has no direct applicability to the play.) 

Nelson’s dramaturgy seems so deliberately constructed, so preconceived, that I just don’t find his plays moving.  They’re more intellectual exercises for me—for instance, in Hopey Changey, trying to keep track of all the references and allusions to New York State politics of three years ago.  Andrew Cuomo’s full name is mentioned early in the play, but thereafter, he’s always called just “Andrew,” and former-Governor Eliot Spitzer is only called “Eliot”—and I kept wondering how many in the Washington audience got that.  Washingtonians are attuned to politics, of course—it’s a supremely political town, after all—but not necessarily New York state politics.  There’s also a quick mention of Spitzer’s short-lived talk show on CNN, Parker Spitzer, a month old at the time the play takes place, and I wondered about that, too.  There were many more obscure references to New York politics as well, especially about Albany and the state’s infantile political structure and hidebound government.  This is not the stuff of national headlines for the most part—it’s inside baseball to which most New Yorkers don’t even pay attention!  Indeed, Nelson himself must have had an inkling of this difficulty since he’d initially dubbed Hopey Changey “a disposable play” because he figured audiences on its first outing in November 2010 would be interested, but that it wouldn’t mean much to subsequent theatergoers. 

I said the press was strongly positive, and the Washington Post led the pack by opening its review with: “Give thanks this week that the Apples fall among us.”  Peter Marks calls the two-play rep “without question a capital occasion” and declares that the plays “are, in a quiet way, thrilling.”  He feels that “the playwright’s generosity of spirit allows an audience to feel as if it, too, always has a place at his table.”  In Washingtonian magazine, Missy Frederick, calling the play “engrossing,” writes that the play eventually becomes “a bracing critique of the current administration, but it happens in a way that just feels like people sitting around, gradually spitting out their pent-up frustrations and realizations” so that “it feels realistic, like the audience is spying on an actual conversation.” “It takes some time to get to that point,” Frederick advises, “but it’s worth the wait.”  “As directed with great sensitivity by Serge Seiden,” writes Chris Klimek in the Washington City Paper, “these plays are so patient and closely observed that the emotional hold they assert over you is insidious.”  The reviewer admits to having been mostly “entranced” and “captivated,” though he’s “still trying to work out exactly why.”  Klimek’s final remark about the Apple family seems also to be his conclusion about the plays: “They’re slow burners, . . . but their effects are lasting.”

On the website MD Theatre Guide, Robert Michael Oliver (who actually draws a parallel between Nelson’s plays and the work of radical South American theater innovator Augusto Boal), declares, “That Hopey Changey Thing offers us a chance to hear ourselves talk to ourselves about our political hopes and anxieties.”  “After watching the Apple Family Plays,” writes Oliver, “you leave the theatre feeling like you have attended someone’s family dinner, with . . .  the ideas quite satisfying.”  He believes the plays, which he dubs “inquisitive, investigative, insightful,” are so provocative that as you leave the theater you’ll ask yourself, “[W]hy haven’t I thought of that before?  Why haven’t I asked that question before?”  With respect to the performances, Oliver states that the “ensemble of superior thespians serves Nelson’s script to perfection.“  DC Theatre Scene’s Ben Demers complains that he “became increasingly frustrated as the family members repeatedly ran over each other in conversation” as none of them were able to finish a thought to Demers’s satisfaction.  Nonetheless, the reviewer finds, “The pleasant veneer of setdesigner [sic] Debra Booth’s cozy dining room conceals buried doubts and resentments, which slowly emerge as the wine begins to flow.”  Demers also feels that “Director Serge Seiden has skillfully delved into Nelson’s script, managing a slate of fine performances” though in the end, he found that although the play raised questions for him, “The overall message of That Hopey Changey Thing is unclear.”  On DC Metro Theatre Arts, Sydney-Chanele Dawkins calls the play “an engrossing slice of family life populated by challenging, complex, ordinary people full of American pie appeal.”  The plays respond, Dawkins writes, “to rich, universal themes, intelligent story subtext, and the focus of idiosyncratic character motivation” and “resonate with eye-opening relevancy and a remarkable immediacy in a powerfully irresistible way.”    Especially complimenting the “extraordinary” finesse of the cast’s “listening skills,” the review-writer also notes the “moving, dynamic interactions and the fresh, riveting performances” of the company. 

It seems, at least as the professional reviewers go, I’m a minority of one.  I agree pretty much across the board with the estimation of the journalists concerning the work of the Studio Theatre’s company; in fact, their work was exemplary in all respects.  But I’m just not as enthusiastic about the play as most of the published reviewers are.  Maybe I’ve become jaded, or the Capital area writers don’t get to see as much quality theater as I do—but I don’t feel the impact they seems to or see the import of Nelson’s themes that they do.  Given that there is this dichotomy of opinion, I suppose it’s fair to say that you all will just have to decide for yourselves if The Apple Family Plays are your kind of theater or not.  Then again, that’s pretty much always the case, isn’t it?

In any case, I also have to confess that I’m glad I saw this production; since the Apple plays have been so well reviewed and so popular with theaters, I feel it’s worthwhile to have experienced at least one of them, particularly in such an exemplary presentation.  I expressed a curiosity about Nelson’s own staging of the plays, currently on stage at New York’s  Public Theater as I reported, but I probably won’t see them.  I’m not curious enough to want to sit through another performance of the same play, and I’m not enamored enough of the whole work to want to sit through the other three just to see what the playwright’s done with them.  If someone donates tickets for me, I might change my mind on that, however.