SPECIAL GUEST STAR. In Richard Nelson’s “Incidental Moments of the Day,” the Apple siblings and their significant others are joined by a friend, Lucy, who performs a dance solo from her apartment in Paris. Clockwise from top left: Jay O. Sanders, Maryann Plunkett, Sally Murphy, Charlotte Bydwell and Stephen Kunken.
INCIDENTAL MOMENTS OF THE DAY: THE APPLE FAMILY ON ZOOM
First of all, you should know that The New York Times pronounced this play, said to be the last in Richard Nelson’s Zoom-format series about the Apple family of Rhinebeck, N.Y., “deeply profound.” Maybe that’s all you need to know.
Like the first two works, “Incidental Moments of the Day” brings together the adult-to-aging Apple siblings on a video screen, because although the Covid-19 pandemic officially began in March, most are still in Isolation. Or near-isolation. Like the first two, this play is about conversation , meaningful conversation (even when it seems casual).
Jane (Sally Murphy) is wistfully hopeful, planning to train to become a counselor for people having difficulty with lockdown. Tim (Stephen Kunkel), her live-in actor-turned-restaurateur boyfriend, who is upstate in his childhood home for the moment, has run into and discussed ‘The Cherry Orchard” with an old drama teacher. Something hangs in the air: Are Jane and Tim coming apart?
Richard, the eldest, is cleaning out his old Albany apartment in preparation for moving to the Hudson Valley. His sister Barbara — with whom he’s been staying in Rhinebeck since she had Covid in the spring — is helping him, although she clearly has some conflicts about his new girlfriend, Yvonne (whom we do not meet). Poor Barbara tries desperately to tell a joke about a woman with a glass eye and does it just dreadfully. The struggle feels like something larger.
I missed Marian (Laila Robins), who is said to be out on a date, her first since the pandemic began. She does pop onto the screen for about five minutes toward the end, explaining that she and the man went out to dinner, so she finally got to see him without his mask.
The special guest star in this play is Charlotte Byrdwell, playing Barbara’s friend Lucy, a dancer who is in Paris at the moment. All the Apples are feeling art-starved, so Barbara has arranged for Lucy to do a balletic-modern-dance solo to an old Scott Joplin rag. I’d love to have been inside Nelson’s head when he made the decision about whether to give the full screen to Lucy during her performance. He decided not to.
I’ll miss these people. I’ll miss their local references (dinner at the Beekman), their literary and theater references (James Baldwin and Athol Fugard), their fondness and their fear.
READ THE ENTIRE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW
WATCH THE PLAY (free, through Nov. 5)
ROLLING WITH THE CAREER PUNCHES. In “Bag Lady” Michael Potts (top photo) is a mysterious man who comes to Washington Square Park to read and reflect. In “No Room at the Ritz,” Alison Fraser (middle photo) plays a powerful magazine editor absorbing some bad news — which keeps getting worse. Kelsey Sheppard (bottom photo) stars in both short plays.
“FASHION VICTIMS: BAG LADY” — It’s pretty cute when a young aspiring model (Kelsey Sheppard) takes a table at Washington Square Park and takes a selfie with the Magnolia Bakery cupcake she’s just bought. When another park visitor, played by Michael Potts, asks if he can share her table, he looks like a man with a secret. My immediate suspicion was that he was an André Leon Talley type, inspired by Vogue’s fashion-editor star, a man powerful enough to make our heroine’s career dreams come true. But no. The man is really there because he loves looking at his old building, where for decades he had a studio apartment with a fireplace. But maybe he actually can help.
“FASHION VICTIMS: NO ROOM AT THE RITZ” — Sheppard plays a powerful magazine editor’s assistant in this play, one who knows more than her boss in more than one way. She gently shares the bad news, which is far worse than the Ritz in Paris not having her usual accommodations for the collections, but then offers solid career advice. The question is whether the editor (Alison Fraser) is smart and open-minded enough to take it.
These short vignettes aren’t nearly as textured or as pointed as “Adrift,” Alleman’s play about rich people escaping planetwide disaster on a cruise-ship condo. But “Fashion Victims” does show its eye for character and the frustrating unpredictability of adult life.
Zoom theater is getting high-tech, as you can see. The first play sets its characters against a Greenwich Village park background; the second puts the magazine staffers in two parts of the same room — the editor’s office and that office’s skyline view.
A GREAT BIG FAKE, EXCEPT WHEN HE ISN’T Michael Sheen in Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer,” which was streamed live in September from the Old Vic in London.
FAITH HEALER
Old Vic on Camera, streamed from the Old Vic Theater in London, Sept. 16-19, 2020
The New York Times
“Michael Sheen Stirs Embers in the Ashes,” The New York Times, by Ben Brantley, 9-21-20
Brian Friel’s 1979 play “Faith Healer” is about a failure. — a man who claims to heal the sick and usually fails. But occasionally, brilliantly, unexpectedly, he pulls off a miracle. tktkttktkttkt. Brantley, who had also seen Donal McCann and Ralph Fiennes in the role over the years, saw something new in the character with Michael Sheen, who “grounds the character in a grimy reality in ways I hadn’t thought possible.”
Sarah Hemming of The Financial Times, by the way, suggests that this is Friel’s greatest play, “a haunting, transfixing piece of theater” about three alternative versions of truth.
Brantley observed: “In a way, it’s about how every one of us is an artist by default, reinventing the world each time we remember something.”
READ THE FULL “FAITH HEALER” REVIEW FROM THE TIMES
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