A.Richard Nelson learned a great lesson, however clichéd it may be, late in his writing career: what you throw away without much thought can end up being one of the greatest works of your life. In the program notes for We’ll See, the last in a series of 12 plays, he admits that he considered the plays “disposable, because they are tied to a given time and place.”
Every November from 2010 to 2013, Nelson visited the fictional Apple family in upstate New York during elections and important national anniversaries, with each play set on the day of its premiere and primarily featuring the same cast. (We’ll See, which opens this week at the Public Theater, sees them await the results of the midterm elections.)
“I really thought four was it, and I was happy with that,” he says.
But the director of Berlin’s Schaubühne Theater met them in 2013, when audiences featured the four in the repertoire and suggested Nelson take them abroad.
“I didn’t think it would make sense,” he says. “The very first line of the first play is ‘Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo,’ and no one 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 subsequently aired on television, toured the world, and Nelson created two other family cycles also set in Rhinebeck, New York, where the writer-director has lived since 1982, allowing him to take his national temperature throughout the first Trump administration. Barely a month after Covid shut down movie theaters, the Apple family appeared in a Zoom trilogy, allowing the works – known as the Rhinebeck Panorama – to reach an even wider audience.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time abroad lately,” he says. “I worked a lot in Paris, kyiv, London, and I felt a real need to try to express for myself certain feelings that I had about what is happening in this country. And it seems to me that I have a way of doing it. I already had the characters: where were they now?”
In an age of mass displacement and gentrification, and in the midst of Nelson’s travels, We’ll See has migration on its mind and an outside-in mentality. Nelson constructs his plays from his extensive note-taking, which allows his characters’ opinions on culture or politics to seem organic – an extension of his own daily observation.
Near the beginning of We’ll See, a family member mentions coming across the 19th-century folk song No One to Welcome You Home (“It’s been in my notebook for a long time”), sparking a discussion about recent ICE raids in the city.
When the conversation turns to Ukraine (where Nelson often works), a character brings up an anecdote about a Ukrainian actor with strikingly different back-to-back interactions during his time in New York: someone took care of his bill in a gesture of empathy, another hurled xenophobic insults. Both are true stories Nelson told and also reflect his recent experiences abroad.
“I was there at the famous White House meeting with Zelensky, and the next morning I felt like I had to apologize to everyone,” he says.
Although one of the characters suggests that the country “may no longer have the burden of being special,” Nelson believes that exceptionalism is “a simplistic slogan,” at least as far as his plays are concerned.
“I think there is a kind of American exceptionalism, which we see right now in a very perverse and grotesque effort, 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 and have been there. You have to feel those feelings to feel the pain, loss and heartbreak when they are taken away or mistreated.”
By focusing on a family, he says, “you’re not dealing with presidents and leaders in an imaginary political world” but rather with the complexities of the individual.
“Everything is connected: our politics, our sex life, our friendships, our cultural interests, everything,” he continues. “As soon as you try to step away one bit and say, ‘Here’s who this 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 creeping 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 faces retirement (both chosen and forced), cancer, and downsizing, and he says that “all of this has to do with what they think, politically, socially, culturally, morally.”
“We’re all a little older,” he says. “I’m a very different person and my actors are different. We all grew up and grew old together, so the play is also about old age.”
Because the plays take place not only toward the end of an evening, but often at the end of exhausting political campaigns, their characters experience an endearing — and recognizable — sense of exhaustion. But in We’ll See, Apple’s first family game since 2020, they feel it even more.
“I tried to write a play that wasn’t going to be about, ‘Who’s going to win the election? What’s going to happen?” — it’s a play about what happened,” he says. “And what happened is we’re all exhausted. We’re all on shifting sands, and there’s not much we can hold on to, and nothing is settled. Living like this day after day is exhausting. I wanted to write about people who are trying to deal with this and feeling this way.”
“There are two kinds of games,” he continues. “There’s a play where the audience says, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And there’s a play where the audience says, “What happened?” My pieces are always the latter; it’s always an outcome of a situation. It’s like you’re sitting in a restaurant and the people next to you are having an interesting conversation: you’re not going to influence anything, but you’re going to learn more and more and, hopefully, it’s interesting.
Gn entert
