My Variety Review: 'What Do We Need To Talk About: Conversations On Zoom'
We’re in a different world since the Apple siblings of Rhinebeck, N.Y. last gathered around the dining table to break bread on stage at Off Broadway’s Public Theater. Over the course of a quartet of plays that began in 2010 and ended in 2013, this middle-class, literate, articulate tribe shared stories, revealed family dynamics and reflected, indirectly, the world outside their doors.
For the new work “What Do We Need to Talk About? The Apple Family: Conversations on Zoom,” which was live-streamed by the Public and YouTube, playwright-director Richard Nelson has brought the brood together again, but each is now isolated in their upstate homes during this pandemic, connected only through the internet for this joint family call.
With this sui generis work written during the last few months, Nelson creates the first original internet play that deftly responds to the form, this family and the times. It more than holds its own in terms of rich writing, clever staging and nuanced performance, and it is as immediate and engaging as many a theater piece for the stage. Call it Zoom Theater, and call it terrific.
In his previous Apple plays, national events were indirectly part of the family discussions but in this current sequestering, the outside forces have reshaped their relative lives and thinking in real and profound ways.
“It’s like floating,” says sister Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) of the indefinite, nebulous situation they find themselves living in, “but you don’t know if you’re going to just crash to the ground and be dead or is something else going to happen. Are you suspended or falling?”