Richard Nelson has spent more than four decades living in Rhinebeck, but only in the last 16 years has he transformed it into one of contemporary American theater’s most remarkable fictional landscapes.
With the publication of The Michaels: A Family at Home and Abroad (Theatre Communications Group), Nelson brings into print the final chapter of his ambitious “Rhinebeck Panorama,” the cycle of 12 plays that followed three interconnected groups—the Apples, the Gabriels, and the Michaels—through the political, cultural, and personal upheavals of the past decade and a half. The volume collects the two Michaels plays, “Conversations During Difficult Times” and “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” both centered on an aging community of dancers, choreographers, and collaborators confronting illness, memory, artistic legacy, and the fragile bonds that hold creative families together.
Although Nelson’s career has taken him from Shakespeare and Chekhov to historical dramas and the screenplay for Hyde Park on Hudson, the Rhinebeck plays have become his signature achievement. Their extraordinary specificity—Bread Alone, the library book sale, the farmers’ market, Kaatsbaan—might seem to tether them tightly to one Hudson Valley village. Nelson sees it differently. “It’s home,” he says simply. “I’ve lived here far more time than I’ve ever lived anywhere in my life. Writing about home is a very visceral thing. It’s very personal.”
Nelson resists treating Rhinebeck as an emblem or postcard. The town functions as the lived-in terrain from which his characters emerge. Had he settled elsewhere, he says, he might have written similarly specific plays—but they would have been entirely different stories because they would have grown from a different home.
Over four decades, he has watched Rhinebeck evolve from a community reeling after IBM’s regional collapse into one marked by prosperity, tourism, and second-home wealth. That gradual transformation forms part of the backdrop to the Panorama, though rarely in overt ways. His characters don’t stop to announce that their town is changing; they simply live through the changes, as people do.
The Michaels continues Nelson’s fascination with everyday life as dramatic material. The first cycle focused on a biological family. The second explored a family connected through marriage. The Michaels examines what Nelson calls an artistic family—a circle of dancers, choreographers, producers, teachers, and longtime collaborators whose relationships have been forged through making work together.
If the plays often seem deceptively quiet, that’s intentional.
“There are two kinds of plays,” Nelson says. “There’s one in which an audience says, ‘What is going to happen?’ That’s a plot-driven play. There’s another where the audience says, ‘What has happened?’ That’s a play in which character is revealed throughout the play. We are discovering, we are learning about people. To me, that is very akin to my experience in life.”
His plays famously unfold around kitchens and dinner tables, where characters chop vegetables, pour wine, and prepare meals while conversations drift between politics, art, illness, and memory. The domestic rituals aren’t decorative; they’re fundamental to Nelson’s understanding of how people actually communicate.
“Most interesting conversations happen while you’re doing other things,” he says. “People are driving in the car. They’re doing something else and a conversation takes place. I think that’s the norm for interesting and even deep conversations.”
That commitment to ordinary life extended even to the way the plays were produced. Each Rhinebeck play premiered on the very day it was set, allowing Nelson to revise dialogue until the last possible moment. During one Apple Family play marking the tenth anniversary of September 11, he added a reference just hours before curtain to a boys’ choir that had sung at that afternoon’s memorial service. The goal was to collapse the distance between audience and stage, allowing viewers to feel they were inhabiting the same moment as the characters.
The publication of The Michaels also arrives as Nelson prepares to revisit his most enduring fictional family. In November, the Apples will return to The Public Theater with a new play set on election night, proving that he still finds these characters useful companions for thinking through the present.
For Nelson, that continuing conversation is less about preserving a portrait of Rhinebeck than about observing how ordinary lives absorb extraordinary times. As his plays have traveled from Germany to Hong Kong, he has become convinced that their intensely local texture is precisely what allows them to resonate so widely. “The more specific you are,” he says, “the more universal you become.”
This article appears in August 2026.
