R ichard Nelson learned a great lesson, cliched as it is, late in his writing career: the thing you toss off without overthinking can end up being some of your life’s greatest work. In the program notes for We’ll See, the latest in what has become a 12-play series, he admits he used to view the plays as “disposable, because of their being tied to a given time and place”.
Every November from 2010–2013, Nelson checked in on 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 mostly starring the same cast. (We’ll See, which opens this week at the Public Theater, sees them awaiting the results of the midterm elections.)
“I totally thought four was it, and I was content with that,” he says.
But the head of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre happened to catch them in 2013, when the Public presented all four in repertory, and suggested Nelson bring them overseas.
“I didn’t think it would make any sense,” he says. “The very first line of the first play is ‘Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo,’ and no one there 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 were then broadcast on television, toured globally, and Nelson spun off two other family cycles also set in Rhinebeck, New York, where the writer-director has lived since 1982, allowing him to take national temperature checks throughout the first Trump administration. Barely a month after Covid shut down live theater, the Apple family popped up in a Zoom trilogy, allowing the works – known as the Rhinebeck Panorama – to reach even wider audiences.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time abroad, recently,” he says. “I’ve been working a lot in Paris, Kyiv, London, and I felt a real need to try to articulate this for myself, some feelings I was having about what’s going on in this country. And I seem to have a way of doing that. I already had the characters: Where were they now?”
In the age of mass displacement and gentrification, and amid Nelson’s travels, We’ll See has migration on its mind, and an outside-in mentality. Nelson builds the plays from his extensive note-taking, which allows his characters’ opinions on culture or politics to feel organic – an extension of his own everyday observation.
Near the beginning of We’ll See, a family member mentions having stumbled upon the 19th-century folk song No One to Welcome You Home (“It had been in my notebook for a long time”), prompting a discussion about the town’s recent ICE raids.
When conversation turns to Ukraine (where Nelson often works), a character brings up an anecdote about a Ukrainian actor with startlingly different back-to-back interactions during her time in New York: someone took care of her bill as a show of empathy, another hurled xenophobic insults. Both are true stories Nelson had been told, and also reflect his recent experiences abroad.
“I was there when the famous White House meeting with Zelensky happened, and the next morning I felt like I needed to apologize to everybody,” he says.
Though one of the characters suggests that maybe the country is “no longer burdened by being special”, Nelson thinks that exceptionalism is “a simplistic slogan”, at least as it pertains to his plays.
“I think there’s a kind of American exceptionalism, which we see in a very perverse and grotesque effort right now, 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 there and have been there. You need to have those feelings to feel the pain and the loss and the sorrow of when they’re being taken away or abused.”
By focusing on a family, he says, “you’re not dealing with presidents and leaders in a fantasy political world,” but rather the complexities of the individual.
“Everything is entwined: our politics, our sex life, friendships, cultural interests, everything,” he continues. “The moment you try to pull one strand away and say ‘This is who that 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 rampant exceptionalism because it’s too complicated.”
Sixteen years into the series, Nelson says he can hear his characters and instinctively know where they’ll stand on certain issues. In 2026, the Apple family is dealing with retirement (both chosen and forced), cancer and downsizing, and he says “all of that connects to what they’re thinking, politically, socially, culturally, morally”.
“We’re all a good bit older,” he says. “I’m a very different person, and my actors are different. We’ve all grown up and grown old together, so the play is also about old age.”
Because the plays are set not only toward the end of an evening, but often at the conclusion of exhausting political campaigns, its characters have an endearing – and recognizable – sense of exhaustion. But in We’ll See, the first Apple family play since 2020, they feel even more so.
“I tried to write a play that was not going to be, ‘Who’s going to win the election? What’s going to happen?’ – it’s a play about what’s happened,” he says. “And what’s happened is we are all exhausted. We’re all on constantly shifting sands, and we can’t hold on to much, and nothing is settled. Living like that day after day, it’s exhausting. I wanted to write about people trying to deal with that and feeling that.”
“There are two kinds of plays,” he continues. “There’s a play in which an audience says, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And there’s a play in which the audience says, ‘What’s happened?’ My plays are always the latter; it’s always an unpeeling of a situation. It’s like if you sit in a restaurant and the people next to you are having an interesting conversation: you’re not going to affect anything, but you’re going to learn more and more and, hopefully, it’s interesting.”
We’ll See is on at the Barbaralee Theater until 29 November
