Richard Nelson's Apple Family Returns in We'll See at the Public Theater

Richard Nelson's twelfth Rhinebeck play, We'll See, opens this week at the Public Theater in New York, with the fictional Apple family awaiting the results of the US midterm elections. It is the first Apple family play since 2020, and it runs at the Barbaralee Theater until 29 November.

Nelson, who writes and directs the series, admits in the program notes that he once viewed the plays as "disposable, because of their being tied to a given time and place". That judgment proved wrong. The lesson he learned late in his career, he told the Guardian, is that the thing you toss off without overthinking can end up being some of your life's greatest work.

Every November from 2010 to 2013, Nelson checked in on the Apple family in upstate New York during elections and national anniversaries. Each play was set on the day of its premiere and starred mostly the same cast.

"I totally thought four was it, and I was content with that," he says.

How did a Berlin theatre change the series?

The head of Berlin's Schaubühne theatre saw the four plays when the Public presented them in repertory in 2013, and suggested Nelson bring them overseas. Nelson doubted the idea would work.

"I didn't think it would make any sense," he says. "The very first line of the first play is 'Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo,' and no one there would know who that was. But when I saw the reaction, the reaction was visceral. I learned the lesson that the more specific you are, the more universal you can be."

The plays were then broadcast on television and toured globally. Nelson spun off two other family cycles, also set in Rhinebeck, New York, where he has lived since 1982. Those works allowed him to take national temperature checks throughout the first Trump administration. Barely a month after Covid shut down live theater, the Apple family returned in a Zoom trilogy, extending the reach of what became known as the Rhinebeck Panorama.

"I've been spending a lot of time abroad, recently," Nelson says. "I've been working a lot in Paris, Kyiv, London, and I felt a real need to try to articulate this for myself, some feelings I was having about what's going on in this country. And I seem to have a way of doing that. I already had the characters: Where were they now?"

What does We'll See change for the family?

In the age of mass displacement and gentrification, the new play has migration on its mind. Nelson builds his plays from extensive note-taking, which lets his characters' opinions on culture and politics feel organic, an extension of his everyday observation.

Near the beginning of We'll See, a family member mentions stumbling upon the 19th-century folk song No One to Welcome You Home. "It had been in my notebook for a long time," Nelson says. The song prompts a discussion about the town's recent ICE raids.

When the conversation turns to Ukraine, where Nelson often works, a character recounts an anecdote about a Ukrainian actor with startlingly different back-to-back interactions in New York: someone paid her bill as a show of empathy, another hurled xenophobic insults. Both are true stories Nelson was told, and they reflect his recent experiences abroad.

"I was there when the famous White House meeting with Zelensky happened, and the next morning I felt like I needed to apologize to everybody," he says.

One character suggests the country may be "no longer burdened by being special", but Nelson rejects exceptionalism as "a simplistic slogan", at least as it pertains to his plays.

"I think there's a kind of American exceptionalism, which we see in a very perverse and grotesque effort right now, in the Maga effort," he says. "I think there's nothing wrong with embracing the beauty of your country and the good things that are there and have been there. You need to have those feelings to feel the pain and the loss and the sorrow of when they're being taken away or abused."

Why family, not politics?

By focusing on a family, Nelson says, "you're not dealing with presidents and leaders in a fantasy political world", but the complexities of the individual.

"Everything is entwined: our politics, our sex life, friendships, cultural interests, everything," he continues. "The moment you try to pull one strand away and say 'This is who that person is,' it trivializes the human being. What these plays are trying to do is not trivialize a human being. There's no possibility of that kind of rampant exceptionalism because it's too complicated."

Sixteen years into the series, Nelson says he can hear his characters and instinctively know where they will stand on certain issues. In 2026, the Apple family deals with retirement, both chosen and forced, cancer and downsizing. "All of that connects to what they're thinking, politically, socially, culturally, morally," he says.

"We're all a good bit older," he says. "I'm a very different person, and my actors are different. We've all grown up and grown old together, so the play is also about old age."

A play about what has happened

The plays are set toward the end of an evening, often at the conclusion of exhausting political campaigns, and their characters carry an endearing, recognizable exhaustion. In We'll See, that exhaustion runs deeper.

"I tried to write a play that was not going to be, 'Who's going to win the election? What's going to happen?' – it's a play about what's happened," Nelson says. "And what's happened is we are all exhausted. We're all on constantly shifting sands, and we can't hold on to much, and nothing is settled. Living like that day after day, it's exhausting. I wanted to write about people trying to deal with that and feeling that."

He closes with a distinction between two kinds of drama. "There's a play in which an audience says, 'What's going to happen?' And there's a play in which the audience says, 'What's happened?' My plays are always the latter; it's always an unpeeling of a situation. It's like if you sit in a restaurant and the people next to you are having an interesting conversation: you're not going to affect anything, but you're going to learn more and more and, hopefully, it's interesting."

Whether the Apples return again after November 29, with this series, seems a question Nelson himself has stopped answering in advance.

By Marcus Bennett