Some of the Gabriels seated around the kitchen table.Photo: Joan Marcus
This is the middle play in a purposely timely trilogy about
one family’s personal travails during the current election season set in Rhinebeck
N.Y. Playwright Richard Nelson further
calls it “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family. With that said
and with all that is said during the talky, occasionally interesting and
occasionally touching gabbing in the kitchen among the Gabriel clan as they gather
and prepare a dinner and talk about their financial woes amidst digressions
that define them all as progressive, intelligent and literate, one does grow to
care about them. Yes, I know that was a long sentence, but I hope it makes my
point.
This new cycle is not too dissimilar from Nelson’s previous
consideration of the various dilemmas confronting the slightly more affluent Apple
family that I finally caught up with on TV amidst my own distracting digressions
necessitated by the dullness of their conversations. I suspect that getting a hearing
device for “What Did You Expect” (no pun intended) helped a lot as I didn’t
miss as much dialogue as I did sitting through the first in play in the series “Hungry”
that dealt mostly with the mourning of the family patriarch.
Despite the play’s atmosphere of realism and general lack of theatrical pretensions
(although it is in its own way totally pretentious) it succeeds in its own high
minded way to bring us close to the bone of each of the six members of the
family as we watch them enter and exit the kitchen, slice and dice, stir and eventually
serve a meal. Play over. Not exactly. Nelson’s gift is creating characters that
ring true on every level as we listen to them collectively consider what can
and cannot be done given their progressively dire financial states. Also
considering what the future may hold for them following the election is also a
factor and an essential dramatic point.
I suppose it will help to say that following the death of Thomas,
the family patriarch, a novelist and playwright who has presumably no
marketable legacy except for the home that his elderly mother Patricia (a superb
Roberta Maxwell) worries she won’t be able to maintain if Trump is elected. It appears
it is up to Thomas’s brother George (the always terrific Jay O. Sanders) to
figure things out except that his work as a piano tuner and carpenter doesn’t
hold much promise for support. He get emotional support, however, from his wife
Hannah (a lovely and empathetic performance by Lynn Hawley) who works as a
caterer’s assistance.
The real question is whether Thomas’ first wife Karin (Meg
Gibson) can find something of value in the pile of papers the deceased left
behind. This, on top of the failure of Thomas’ grieving widow Mary to keep up
her medical license. Then there is Thomas’ sister Joyce (a lively Amy Warren),
an assistant costume designer who lives in Brooklyn who can do little but empathize,
hit and run. By the time we get to the final episode and the election results,
we will all have to decide, along with the Gabriels, whether to stay, stick it
out, or run.
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