Spending Election Year With ‘The Gabriels’

Director and playwright Richard Nelson came to town recently for the Kennedy Center’s presentation of his ambitious, intimately epic “The Gabriels Trilogy: Election Year in the Life of One Family.”

The three plays — “Hungry,” “What Did You Expect?” and “Women of a Certain Age” — were conceived as real-time plays taking place during the 2016 election year. Originally produced at New York’s Public Theater, the trilogy centers on the experience of one middle-class American family in the upstate New York town of Rhinebeck.

“Hungry” premiered last March, in the aftermath of a Republican debate; “What Did You Expect?” in September; and “Women of a Certain Age” on election night — early in that long night’s proceedings, with the characters not knowing the outcome.

When you chat with Nelson, as we did by telephone, you end up talking about the place of theater in the body politic and the importance of the human connection between play and audience.

“We all know politics is like theater,” he said. “It’s often very theatrical and full of heightened drama. But what we deal with in my plays is not the noise of politics and elections but its effect, the way things are talked about around a kitchen table, what people are thinking about and feeling during the course of the concerns about what’s going on in their lives.”

Unlike their initial as-events-unfold journey, the plays are being presented in repertory at the Kennedy Center Theater Lab. On a Saturday or Sunday through Jan. 22, you can take in the trilogy in one gulp (an eight-hour marathon). If you prefer to see them one at a time, the last separate performances are Jan. 17, 18 and 19.

An earlier set by Nelson, “The Apple Family Plays,” was a tetralogy (as in four), strung out over four years. Each play was cued to history, politics and commemorations of note: the eve of midterm elections, the anniversary of 9/11, election night 2012 and the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Two were presented here in Washington at Studio Theatre.

Speaking of “The Gabriels,” Nelson said: “For each of the three plays, and this was true of ‘The Apple Family Plays,’ when they entered repertory, you had the total emotional impact. And it was very powerful. It’s different from how it all began. But initially, you have all this immediacy, this intimacy of the here-and-now. They’re talking about things familiar to all of us.”

The first play opens following a funeral. Throughout the trilogy, says Nelson, family issues are “the real focus — death, aging, economics in terms of daily life, money, love and attitudes. The election isn’t overt. It’s not like some obsessive things in their life, as if that’s all they talked about.”

“The Gabriels” has the original New York cast, including Meg Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Robert Maxwell and Amy Warren. It also has Jay O. Sanders and Mary Ann Plunkett, who were also in “The Apple Family Plays.” Sanders is a veteran stage, television and screen actor and playwright. His “Unexplored Interior,” an epic play about the Rwanda genocide, opened the Mosaic Theater’s debut season at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in 2014.

Nelson is a prolific, successful and versatile playwright. He’s written the books for the Tony Award-winning musicals “The Dead” (based on James Joyce’s short story) and “Chess” and delved into Frank Lloyd Wright with “Frank’s Home.” He adapted Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” “The Seagull” and “The Wood Demon” and wrote “Misha’s Party” for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he had ten plays produced. His plays “The Vienna Notes” and “Principia Scriptoriae” were staged in Washington by Woolly Mammoth and Studio Theatre, respectively.

Many times when you read about him and his work, Chekhov comes up. “Oh, sure. He’s enormously influential to me, important to me. If you see any of his plays — in whatever form — you tend to listen carefully,” Nelson said.

“The most important thing in theater is that bond between audience and the stage and the actors,” Nelson said. Of “The Gabriels,” he stated: “This is an intimate world of very human conversations that you will want to lean forward to witness and overhear, as if you were watching and listening through a half-opened window or keyhole.”

The audience will be looking at a middle-class family, not necessarily wealthy or even close to wealth, watching their town change with new arrivals, listening to the echoes of the election as it proceeds, dealing with advancing age, death, the choices that must be made, the family members being pulled into closer proximity.

It’s meant to be an inviting setting — kitchen, house, food and talk — but, as someone once said, attention must be paid.

What impacts the Gabriels most about the election is not the candidates themselves — although, for the women, Hillary Clinton does come up in conversation (but Donald Trump does not) — as the strangeness of the process, how different it is from the past and what that might mean for the future.

No matter how or when you experience the complete trilogy, it will be different. As an audience, we’ll be bringing the events in our lives, in our city, in our country, in the world to the theater. They will enter into the plays, in that sense, unspoken but alive.