The Public Theater (New York)

Tony award winning Richard Nelson’s celebrated four play cycle centres on the fictional, liberal Apple family of upstate New York and explores politics, change and family dynamics in the 21st century with remarkable immediacy.

First commissioned by The Public Theater, each play premiered on the night on which it was set. In That Hopey Changey Thing, the Apples reflect on the state of their family and discuss memory, manners and politics as polls close
on the 2010 mid-term elections and a groundswell of conservative sentiment flips Congress on its head.

In Sweet And Sad, a family brunch on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 stirs up discussions of loss, remembrance and a decade of change.

Sorry finds the Apples sorting through family anxieties and confusion on the day of electing the President in November 2012.

Regular Singing, the deeply intimate fourth and final instalment, is set on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.