Lynn Hawley, Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett and Meg Gibson in Hungry (Photo by Joan Marcus)
I’m writing this column during an interval. I’ll still be waiting out that interval when I write again next week. In fact, I won’t be getting in for Act II until September, after which I’ll wait about six weeks for Act III.
Of course, this is an exaggeration, but as I try to explain the experience of seeing Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, it gets at what Nelson is doing with his new trilogy, akin to what he previously achieved with his quartet, The Apple Family Plays.
Offering glimpses of a few hours with a family at something approaching real time, these works are not unlike dropping in on relatives that you manage to see only a few times a year. In some ways, it’s the opposite of immersive theatre: it gives you a very small taste of a story, and then makes you wait for months before you get another shot. To be fair, each play can stand on its own, though the collective experience gains a cumulative power.
I saw the first of The Gabriels plays, Hungry, on March 6; the events of the play took place on March 5, 2016 – and they always will. That’s why subsequent stagings of these Nelson works will never quite match the temporal verisimilitude of their first productions, because even if they’re spaced out to approximate real time, they can never again be exactly of the original moment. For all their simplicity, these Nelson works are almost daring in their formal approach to time.
Usually when we think about time in the theatre it’s durational: how many hours did it take? The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, The Mahabarata, The Norman Conquests, Gatz: part of the experience is how long we sit for them – and subsequently we brandish our stamina in front of others. Nelson not only wants audiences to allow their own lives to pass before they next experience the work, but he also wants time genuinely to pass in the life of his characters – and it forces him as a playwright to grapple with intervening events in the world, beyond the Rhinebeck NY village where both multi-play works are set.
The tradition of playing with time in theatre is longstanding; J.B. Priestley used it frequently, in such plays as Time and the Conways; Ayckbourn has toyed with it as well, adding the geographic complications and simultaneity of House and Garden. More recently, Annie Baker has pushed the perceived boundaries of what can be done with naturalistic dialogue in The Flick, mandating gaps in conversation that mimic halting, awkward real speech, but are contrary to the snap and pace of so many stage works.
Sarah Steele, Arian Moayed and Jayne Houdyshell in The Humans (Photo by Joan Marcus)
Even as The Gabriels unfolds its first chapter and leaves us wondering what will be part of the next, another experiment in time is taking place on Broadway, but so subtly that few people realise they’ve seen one.
Moving from Off-Broadway, Stephen Karam’s The Humans has once again been acclaimed for its portrait of a family at Thanksgiving as they reveal the threads that may be unraveling in their permanently linked lives.
But what people miss is that while the play appears to unfold in real time, from the arrival of guests for dinner right up to the moment the guests depart – with drinks and meal included – it takes only 90 minutes from start to finish, never seeming rushed or abbreviated. Karam packs in an enormous amount of information about his characters’ lives in circumstances as mundane and everyday as those in The Gabriels. His sleight-of-hand compression, played out without a pause, takes an event we know to be lengthy from our own experiences and leaves us thinking we’ve watched the real thing.
Though it is often held up as an artistic goal, nothing in the theatre can ever truly be natural; a certain artificiality is inherent in the form. But right now in New York, in the least apparent of productions, we’re watching playwrights alter how we perceive time and how it can be employed in the theatre, invisible stage magic played out at extraordinary length and deceptive brevity.
