Who is this Anita Gates you speak of?

A.G.’s journalistic triumphs over 25 years at The New York Times include drinking with Bea Arthur (at a Trump hotel), Wendy Wasserstein (at an Italian restaurant) and Peter O’Toole (in his trailer on a mini-series set near Dublin). It is sheer coincidence that these people are now dead.

At The New York Times, she has been Arts & Leisure television editor and co-film editor, a theater reviewer on WQXR Radio, a film columnist for the Times TV Book and an editor in the Culture, Book Review, Travel, National, Foreign and Metro sections. Her first theater review for The Times appeared in 1997, assessing “Mrs. Cage,” a one-act about a housewife suspected of shooting her favorite supermarket box boy. The review was mixed.

Outside The Times, A.G. has been the author of four nonfiction books; a longtime writer for travel magazines, women's magazines and travel guidebooks; a lecturer at universities and for women’s groups; and a moderator for theater, book, film and television panels at the 92nd Street Y and the Paley Center for Media.

If she were a character on “Mad Men,” she’d be Peggy.

Place: A Computer Screen. Time: April 2020. A Play in One Act.

Anita Gates
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NO BAD APPLES? The Apple family can’t get together in person — pandemic lockdown thing, you know — but they have a lot to say in “What Do We Need to Talk About?” Clockwise from top left, Jay O. Sanders, Maryann Plunkett, Sally Murphy, Laila Robins and Stephen Kunken.

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WHAT DO WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT?

The Apple Family; Conversations on Zoom

“Opened” on April 29, 2020. Written and directed by Richard Nelson. Narrated by Oskar Eustis. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. No intermission. Available to stream through June 28, 2020 (11:59 p.m.). publictheater.org. Free.

For donations: publictheater.org

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EXPOSITION IS EASY. COMEDY IS HARD. Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, narrates on screen, updating viewers on the lives of the characters we first met years ago in “That Hopey-Changey Thing.”

THE APPLES ARE BACK. But the Apple family members are not sitting around one of their dining tables in Rhinebeck, N.Y., just a hop, skip and jump north of Manhattan. They’re where everybody else is these days — sitting in front of their computer screens in their individual homes, catching up via Zoom.

And here’s how they feel about things: They love Andrew Cuomo now. Mr. Cuomo, governor of New York (and Richard Apple’s longtime boss) — has been doing daily television briefings about the pandemic and what the numbers are, from new cases diagnosed to hospital admissions to intubations to deaths. All with compassion, intelligence and full, grammatical sentences.

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SIBLING CUTLERY Richard (Jay O. Sanders) and his sister Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) in “What Do We Need to Talk About?” Conveniently, Sanders and Plunkett have been married to each other — in real life — since 1991, so the script has him staying at her house.

Richard (Jay O. Sanders), a lawyer, is 67 now and wants to retire. During quarantine, he’s discovered how satisfying it can be to wash dishes. “I want to do something I can finish,” he explains.

Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), his sister, who has just been released from the hospital (yes, it was Covid-19), warns him not to be rash. “When was I rash?” he asks her. She brings up the time he quit clarinet lessons — when he was 13.

Yep, they’re a family.

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FEED A COLD, DECANT A FEVER. Tim (Steven Kunken, in photo) and Jane (Sally Murphy,) live together in the play, but Kunken and Murphy don’t. To make that Zoom-believable, the script has a febrile (and thirsty) Tim self-quarantining in a separate room of their home.

All the Apples and their loved ones have stuff going on. They’re a liberal bunch, as their fans learned in “The Apple Family Plays” (beginning with “That Hopey-Changey Thing”) — among them teachers, an attorney, a writer and an actor who runs a restaurant.

So it’s absolutely believable when a casual few lines of dialogue turn out to be theater-insider material. And a personal tribute. “And Mark Blum is not Swedish.” “He had asthma.” (Blum was a much-loved New York stage actor who died of Covid-19 in March.)

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LIBERALS AT THE TABLE A scene from “That Hopey-Changey Thing” (2010) at the Public Theater. Remember sets? And props?

But when it’s time to take turns talking (with five people on one Zoom screen, Robert’s Rules of Order come in handy), the Apples’ stories don’t seem that personal. A story about an author and a novel. An anecdote about President Franklin Pierce and an unfortunate yappy dog he received as a gift. Messages about healing in “The Cherry Orchard” and the character of the man who wrote it, Anton Chekhov. And of course the conversational gold standard of 2020: grocery shopping.

It all turns out to be just personal enough.

Don’t take our word for it. The New York Times called the production “infinitely poignant” (yes, they’re reviewing online plays now). Peter Marks of The Washington Post described the one-act as a “riveting new drama,” concluding that it was “the most Chekhovian” of Richard Nelson’s Rhinebeck plays. Vogue magazine praised the work’s theatrical intimacy and observed, “It’s almost like you are watching a new art form being born.”

Yeah.


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