\u201cI totally thought four was it, and I was content with that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
But the head of Berlin\u2019s Schaub\u00fchne theatre happened to catch them in 2013, when the Public presented all four in repertory, and suggested Nelson bring them overseas.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t think it would make any sense,\u201d he says. \u201cThe very first line of the first play is \u2018Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 known as the Rhinebeck Panorama \u2013 to reach even wider audiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been spending a lot of time abroad, recently,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve 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\u2019s going on in this country. And I seem to have a way of doing that. I already had the characters: Where were they now?\u201d<\/p>\n
In the age of mass displacement and gentrification, and amid Nelson\u2019s travels, We\u2019ll See has migration on its mind, and an outside-in mentality. Nelson builds the plays from his extensive note-taking, which allows his characters\u2019 opinions on culture or politics to feel organic \u2013 an extension of his own everyday observation.<\/p>\n
Near the beginning of We\u2019ll See, a family member mentions having stumbled upon the 19th-century folk song No One to Welcome You Home (\u201cIt had been in my notebook for a long time\u201d), prompting a discussion about the town\u2019s recent ICE raids.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
![\"Richard](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/489.jpg\")
Richard Nelson Photograph: Courtesy of The Public Theater<\/p>\n
\u201cI was there when the famous White House meeting with Zelensky happened, and the next morning I felt like I needed to apologize to everybody,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Though one of the characters suggests that maybe the country is \u201cno longer burdened by being special\u201d, Nelson thinks that exceptionalism is \u201ca simplistic slogan\u201d, at least as it pertains to his plays.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s a kind of American exceptionalism, which we see in a very perverse and grotesque effort right now, in the Maga effort,\u201d he says. \u201cI think there\u2019s 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\u2019re being taken away or abused.\u201d<\/p>\n
By focusing on a family, he says, \u201cyou\u2019re not dealing with presidents and leaders in a fantasy political world,\u201d but rather the complexities of the individual.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything is entwined: our politics, our sex life, friendships, cultural interests, everything,\u201d he continues. \u201cThe moment you try to pull one strand away and say \u2018This is who that person is,\u2019 it trivializes the human being. What these plays are trying to do is not trivialize a human being. There\u2019s no possibility of that kind of rampant exceptionalism because it\u2019s too complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sixteen years into the series, Nelson says he can hear his characters and instinctively know where they\u2019ll stand on certain issues. In 2026, the Apple family is dealing with retirement (both chosen and forced), cancer and downsizing, and he says \u201call of that connects to what they\u2019re thinking, politically, socially, culturally, morally\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all a good bit older,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m a very different person, and my actors are different. We\u2019ve all grown up and grown old together, so the play is also about old age.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maryann Plunkett in We\u2019ll See Photograph: Courtesy of The Public Theater<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 and recognizable \u2013 sense of exhaustion. But in We\u2019ll See, the first Apple family play since 2020, they feel even more so.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried to write a play that was not going to be, \u2018Who\u2019s going to win the election? What\u2019s going to happen?\u2019 \u2013 it\u2019s a play about what\u2019s happened,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd what\u2019s happened is we are all exhausted. We\u2019re all on constantly shifting sands, and we can\u2019t hold on to much, and nothing is settled. Living like that day after day, it\u2019s exhausting. I wanted to write about people trying to deal with that and feeling that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are two kinds of plays,\u201d he continues. \u201cThere\u2019s a play in which an audience says, \u2018What\u2019s going to happen?\u2019 And there\u2019s a play in which the audience says, \u2018What\u2019s happened?\u2019 My plays are always the latter; it\u2019s always an unpeeling of a situation. It\u2019s like if you sit in a restaurant and the people next to you are having an interesting conversation: you\u2019re not going to affect anything, but you\u2019re going to learn more and more and, hopefully, it\u2019s interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Nelson learned a great lesson, cliched as it is, late in his writing career: the thing you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-665613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}