It was September 2020, and after 10 years, four in-person plays and three pandemic-era virtual installments, the playwright Richard Nelson truly thought he had finished with the Apple family, the mainstays of his politically attuned Rhinebeck play series.
But then Donald Trump was elected to a second term, and Nelson realized he wanted to hear from the Apples again.
So when Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater in Manhattan, which had produced the previous Apple family plays, asked him last summer if he had a new play, he suggested bringing the Apples back.
“He said yes, right away,” Nelson, 76, told me in late September at the Public. Rehearsals for that play, “We’ll See,” were scheduled to begin the next day. Set on the night of the 2026 midterm elections, it is slated to open this Election Day, Nov. 3.
“It’s like a family reunion,” Nelson said of the cast. Four of the five actors are reprising their roles from previous installments, including the married stars Jay O. Sanders, 73, and Maryann Plunkett, 73, who play siblings.
The Apple plays, a series of eight family dramas written over 16 years, are all set in the Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck, N.Y. (They are part of a series of 13 plays by Nelson that encompass three different families who reside in Rhinebeck.)
“It’s a gift,” Nelson said of this rare instance of casting continuity. “How better to do a play about a family when these people have been working on and off with each other for 13 years?”
Nelson’s shows are singular, said Sanders, not only for the lived-in atmosphere they evoke, but also for offering meaty, believable depictions of characters navigating difficult conversations that don’t feel scripted.
“That’s what audiences miss when they get together with their own brother or sister,” said Sanders, who plays Richard, a recently retired lawyer. “No one’s saying ‘How do you feel about that?’ and really asking, caring about the response.”
Nelson wrote his first Apple family play, “That Hopey Changey Thing,” in 2010, during the second year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Set on the eve of that year’s midterm elections, it follows the Apples — three middle-aged sisters and one brother, all Democrats — as they gather for dinner in Rhinebeck and navigate both personal worries and broader political anxieties.
“Oskar Eustis had asked me to write a large-scale play — maybe about Iraq — and I came back and said, ‘How about if I write a play about a family sitting around a table having dinner, talking?” said Nelson, who grew up in the deep blue, union-dominated steel town of Gary, Ind., and has lived in Rhinebeck since the early 1980s.
While he had initially envisioned the play as a one-off, it became clear that the characters had quite a lot to talk about.
“I remember telling Oskar, ‘I think I’m onto something where, if something happens — I was thinking maybe another 9/11 — that we wanted to react to, to connect with, in the theater, I think I have a way to do that,’” Nelson said.
Over meals like baked ziti, three bean salad and pound cake, his characters have wrestled with issues including grief, aging and the shifting landscape of American politics.
Plunkett, who plays Barbara, a high school English teacher, said she is drawn to the way Nelson’s characters have candid conversations that don’t feel contrived.
“People will tell me, ‘I want my family to be able to talk like that,’” she said. “People see their own lives, or the conversations they wish they were having.”
In the latest play, Barbara confronts retirement after she loses her temper during a heated classroom discussion and accidentally hits a student’s desk with a piece of chalk.
“One of the very hearts of the play is age,” Nelson said. “People who were in their late 50s when we started these plays in 2010 are now in their 70s. That’s a journey that I try to articulate, confront, relate to in the play.”
Just then, an alarm beeped on his phone.
“That’s an air raid alert in Kyiv,” said Nelson, who has directed three plays in the Ukrainian capital in the last two years, including “When the Hurlyburly’s Done,” staged at the Public last year, and “Conversations in Tusculum,” his 2008 play that imagines Brutus and others deciding whether to assassinate Julius Caesar.
While Russia’s attacks bore down on the country, he saw Ukrainians try to move forward with their lives. The experience profoundly affected him.
“We don’t know what we would do if we were sitting in a shelter, and the bombs are getting closer,” said Nelson. “And what do they do? They put on a play. That’s pretty amazing. That gives you hope.”
After “We’ll See,” Nelson intends to continue working on a new play he’s writing for the company in Kyiv.
And he may not be done with the Apples: There’s a presidential election on the horizon in 2028, after all.
“Who knows,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “We’ll see.”
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