Richard Nelson has brought his Rhinebeck Panorama series back to the stage with We'll See, a new play that places the fictional Apple family in the anxious hours while awaiting midterm election results. The work is the latest instalment in what has grown into a 12-play cycle examining private life against a shifting national backdrop.
A series rooted in the present
Nelson conceived the Rhinebeck plays to be intimately tied to particular moments in time: each play is set on the day of its premiere and, in most cases, features the same ensemble of actors. That structural choice—staging domestic conversations as the nation confronts elections and anniversaries—has been a defining feature of the cycle since Nelson began staging the pieces in 2010.
He has acknowledged in the programme notes for We'll See that he once regarded those time-bound plays as largely disposable because of their immediate topicality, but the project has continued to resonate. Every November from 2010 through 2013 he returned to the Apple family in upstate New York for plays staged on significant civic dates; the new work resumes that pattern by placing the characters in the midst of a contemporary electoral moment.
Life on 'constantly shifting sands'
Nelson frames the plays as a way to capture how political events seep into everyday life. As the company opens at the Public Theater this week, We'll See turns on the mixture of domestic routine and public uncertainty as the Apple household waits for the outcome of the midterms. The playwright has described the cultural environment in which the plays operate as, in his words, "constantly shifting sands," underlining the sense of instability the series aims to dramatise.
Continuity and immediacy
The Rhinebeck Panorama's reliance on a recurring cast and real-time settings gives the plays an immediacy that critics and audiences have noted in previous instalments. With We'll See, Nelson continues to use modest, intimate scenes of family life to reflect broader social and political anxiety, a method that has defined the cycle's exploration of America's divisions and continuities.