On March 5, the day that his play “Hungry” opened at the Public Theater, Richard Nelson made two adjustments to his drama about the Gabriels, a middle-class family living in the New York hamlet of Rhinebeck. One had to do with the weather, the other had to do with politics. After watching the Republican presidential debate the previous evening, the dramatist was inspired to add the reactions of his characters to the slugfest. Mary, a retired doctor, says that she would vote for Megyn Kelly, the Fox News anchor who moderated the debate, “if she wasn’t a Republican.” Her sister-in-law Joyce, a local caterer, observes, “It feels like we’re all about to go over a cliff.” Her sister, Hannah, a costume designer living in Brooklyn, wryly concedes, “God, it’s going to be a very long eight months.” Nelson introduced this new form of “theater-verite” in “The Apply Plays,” a tetralogy covering significant events surrounding the Obama presidency produced from 2010 to 2013 at the Public. “Hungry,” which plays through April 3, is the first in a new Nelson trilogy called “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family.” The subsequent plays will open, respectively, in September and on election night in November. “It’s not verite so much as being so specific in time and place that we feel we’re being allowed into a world that’s truthful,” said Nelson. “That specificity has paid dividends in a kind universality.”While a feverish political season rages outside the modest home of the Gabriels, it is allowed to only occasionally seep into the discourse of a family reunion occasioned by the death of Mary’s husband, Thomas, a playwright. Among those also gathered are his brother George, a piano teacher and cabinetmaker; Karin, Thomas’s ex-wife, an actress and teacher; and Patricia, the family matriarch. While Hillary Clinton gets mentioned most, Trump is mentioned only once by name and Bernie Sanders receives a cameo when Hannah’s son is said to “feel the Bern.” In a chat with ARTINFO, Nelson, a veteran playwright (“James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’”), explains why the conversation around the Gabriels’ kitchen table is of more import to him than the tantrums of our roiling political scene.Your play is called “Hungry,” but given the rage supposedly coursing through the electorate, could it have been called “Angry”? Well, I think the word “hungry” is used in a lot of different meanings in the play. I think the word is richer than just angry. It’s about many things — an emptiness, a need, a desire. I think the word itself is broader and deeper.Are the Gabriels angry? I don’t know. I think anger is perhaps an element but again it’s more complicated than that. Anger is just a lashing out in a certain way. With the Gabriels, they’re seriously trying to figure out where they belong. They’re trying to ask questions: what is happening? And where do I fit in?What has brought on this place of displacement? I think that society has monetarized so much. The discrepancy between the very wealthy and the middle class has widened. There’s a feeling of where does one belong? Where does one’s moral beliefs fit in? Where do your priorities fit in a society that puts their values somewhere else?What are their values? I think it’s a sense of fairness, and trusting each other, a sense that there is a value to art and culture. A place where their soulful things matter greater than pure economic things.At one point, George observes that New Yorkers don’t know what anything’s worth anymore. What does he mean? Some people are so wealthy, money is thrown around in such ways that the value of something gets diluted or confused. So, we all know stories of people paying huge sums of money for a particular thing — housing, for example, where the idea of $2 million apartment was unheard of and now it’s almost an average. The $70 million apartment is an absurd concept. It exists.The price of a Broadway ticket? It certainly could be applied to that. Sure. That’s pretty good. In a way, it really doesn’t make any sense. If money really doesn’t matter to you, then it’s meaningless. It’s confused.Do the Gabriels resent the rich? It’s not so much contempt as fear. They’re questioning who these people are. Hannah [the caterer] sees [rich] people on one hand and knows these people want to do good and are trying to go do good things. At the same time, she hears them speak in such a way that they feel they’ve earned everything they’ve got. There are different signals being sent. That’s not hatred. That’s confusion.In the cosmology of the play, is there an equation between the talk of the hedge fund guy and talk of the phone scams meant to victimize? Absolutely, yeah. There’s a sense of being preyed upon. The world outside feels suddenly dangerous. Certainly dangerous to the mother, and to the others as well. You’re at the mercy of people. Absolutely.How did you calibrate how much the politics outside the play would intrude? It was calibrated in “Hungry” in telling the stories of these people and then constantly seeing where I felt these people would be in terms of the overt politics of the given time. You can imagine events where there would be a need to talk about it and other times when there’d be very little talk about it.The women in the play consider Hillary Clinton with some skepticism. They want a woman president but they question whether she is the one. The question is raised but it’s not answered. We are at just the start of the political season so we’ll have to see how that is worked out over the next two plays and how the campaign goes over the course of the next eight months.As a dramatist, are you rooting for Donald Trump to succeed? No! No! I root for my country first and foremost.What do you make of Trump? I don’t know. It’s very surprising. But I’m a writer, not a politician. Mostly what I am interested in is trying to describe people as richly as I can and put them in a context as best I can. What I think politically, that’s just another can of worms.Are you alarmed? As a citizen, we’re in an odd and surprising place. Absolutely. It’s an unsettling time.Doesn’t that make for a mother lode for a dramatist? Well, I’m not looking… the mother lode for me is a group of people in Rhinebeck who are just trying to survive and move forward with a lot of things in their way, whether it’s in the political arena, the personal arena, the health arena. Just to watch them try to pull out something good from themselves and from each other.
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