The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family

Description

In this acclaimed three-part play cycle, Richard Nelson-author of the much-lauded The Apple Family plays-deftly embeds the chaotic tension of the 2016 Presidential election into the hyperrealistic family gathering in the home of the Gabriels in Rhinebeck, New York. Each play is set over the course of one evening in the house the family grew up in. History (both theirs and our country's), money, politics, family and culture are mixed together as a meal is being made-all combining to make theatre that is as immediate as it is riveting in its humanity. The trilogy includes Hungry, What Did You Expect?, and Women of a Certain Age. Richard Nelson's many plays include The Apple Family plays, Rodney's Wife, Goodnight Children Everywhere, Drama Desk-nominated Franny's Way, and Some Americans Abroad, Tony Award-nominated Two Shakespearean Actors, and the James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey), for which he won a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Over the next ten years, Nelson will be collaborating with preeminent translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky on a major translation series of classic Russian plays. From the author of The Apple Family plays, this illuminating trilogy reflects on American life during the 2016 national election

Richard Nelson's many plays include Illyria, The Apple Family, Nikolai and the Others, Goodnight Children Everywhere (Olivier Award for Best Play), Franny's Way, Some Americans Abroad, Frank's Home, Two Shakespearean Actors and James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey; Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical).

Hungry - "A wonderful new play...may well be the most resonantly topical and emotionally engaging play of this election year. Mr. Nelson finds the weave of momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian. These works are as personal as they are political, and you cannot separate the two any more than you can in your own life." What Did You Expect? - "The second work in the second cycle of plays by Mr. Nelson that have quietly emerged as a sui generis triumph of civic theater... It is a testament to Mr. Nelson's well-honed craft, and that of his cast, that these topics are seldom addressed directly yet are embedded in the play's every fragment. His family cycles inhabit the here and now with an unobtrusive thoroughness I've never encountered elsewhere in the theater." Women of a Certain Age - "The Gabriels, the tenderly wrought creations of the playwright Richard Nelson, along with Mr. Nelson's earlier tetralogy, The Apple Family Plays, may collectively represent the most profound achievement in topical theater in this country since the Depression-era triumphs of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock. The talk in Women never strays far from the safe foot path of casual conversation. But Mr. Nelson knows that in certain contexts, no conversation is casual...before you know it, this modest play has indirectly addressed matters both of the utmost immediate relevance, and of cosmic implications." -- Ben Brantley * New York Times * "Richard's determination to put real life onstage, to tell the truth by avoiding all grandstanding and theatrical flourishes, has created a masterful trilogy of plays that show us, not only the way we live now, but the way we live." * Oskar Eustis, from his Introduction *