This is the middle play in a purposely timely trilogy about one family’s personal travails during the current election season set in Rhinebeck N.Y. Playwright Richard Nelson further calls the full opus, “The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family,” with this installment titled, “What Did You Expect?”. With that said and with all that is said during the talky, occasionally interesting, and occasionally touching gabbing in the kitchen among the Gabriel clan as they gather and prepare a dinner and talk about their financial woes amidst digressions that define them all as progressive, intelligent, and literate, one does grow to care about them. Yes, I know that was a long sentence, but I hope it makes my point.
This new cycle is not too dissimilar from Nelson’s previous consideration of the various dilemmas confronting the slightly more affluent Apple family that I finally caught up with on TV amidst my own distracting digressions necessitated by the dullness of their conversations. I suspect that getting a hearing device for What Did You Expect (no pun intended) helped a lot as I didn’t miss as much dialogue as I did sitting through the first in play in the series, Hungry, that dealt mostly with the mourning of the family patriarch.
Despite the play’s atmosphere of realism and general lack of theatrical pretensions (although it is in its own way totally pretentious), it succeeds in its own high-minded way to bring us close to the bone of each of the six members of the family as we watch them enter and exit the kitchen, slice and dice, stir, and eventually serve a meal. Play over. Not exactly. Nelson’s gift is creating characters that ring true on every level as we listen to them collectively consider what can and cannot be done given their progressively dire financial states. Also considering what the future may hold for them following the election is a factor and an essential dramatic point.
I suppose it will help to say that following the death of Thomas, the family patriarch, a novelist and playwright who has presumably no marketable legacy except for the home that his elderly mother Patricia (a superb Roberta Maxwell) worries she won’t be able to maintain if Trump is elected. It appears it is up to Thomas’s brother George (the always terrific Jay O. Sanders) to figure things out except that his work as a piano tuner and carpenter doesn’t hold much promise for support. He get emotional support, however, from his wife Hannah (a lovely and empathetic performance by Lynn Hawley) who works as a caterer’s assistant.
The real question is whether Thomas’s first wife Karin (Meg Gibson) can find something of value in the pile of papers the deceased left behind. This, on top of the failure of Thomas’s grieving widow Mary to keep up her medical license. Then there is Thomas’s sister Joyce (a lively Amy Warren), an assistant costume designer who lives in Brooklyn who can do little but empathize, hit and run. By the time we get to the final episode and the election results, we will all have to decide, along with the Gabriels, whether to stay, stick it out, or run.
