The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy

Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy represents one of the earliest and most nuanced artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The trilogy includes What Do We Need to Talk About?, And So We Come Forth, and Incidental Moments of the Day—all written and directed by Nelson and performed in real time via Zoom during the early months of lockdown. The trilogy captures both the existential pandemic and political agitation of 2020 through the lens of a fictional household in Rhinebeck, New York, centering around a liberal, white, middle-class American family. The first theatrical instalment, What Do We Need to Talk About? was performed live on Zoom and premiered on 29 April 2020, produced by the Public Theater (the same off-Broadway venue that had premiered all four of Nelson’s earlier Apple Family plays between 2010 and 2013). The actors appeared in Zoom’s gallery view throughout the performance, emphasizing the remote and fragmented nature of the interaction. This moment marked a significant shift in theatrical history. While traditional theatre depends on physical presence and spatial intimacy, pandemic-era theatre adapted to their absence. Nelson embraced the digital format, transforming the architecture of live performance into one mediated entirely through a technological interface.

What Do We Need to Talk About? and And So We Come Forth focus on infection, isolation, and lockdown, while the final segment, Incidental Moments of the Day, incorporates discussions of the Black Lives Matter movement, which unfolded alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. Across all three plays, the characters’ concerns are shaped by their identities as white, middle-class Americans in midlife. They discuss the everyday inconveniences of pandemic life, such as the difficulty of grocery shopping and the relief of finding their favorite peanut butter in stock. They openly share their depression, fears, and anxieties, while also acknowledging their privilege, “There are so many people who can’t stay at home like us”, and do not pretend to universalize the pandemic experience. The trilogy is thus sharply self-aware of its socio-political positioning. The Apple family—educated, articulate, and relatively secure—embodies a privileged demographic during the pandemic. Their self-reflexivity highlights the class and racial inequities that the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests exposed. While the plays capture their collective guilt and liberal discomfort, they stop short of offering solutions; instead, Nelson documents a particular social class grappling with its place in a time of global crisis, where self-awareness does not necessarily lead to action. The trilogy stands as a valuable cultural document of the pandemic in the United States.