The Public Theater Adds Richard Nelson Three-Play Cycle to Season

The Public Theater announced today that the world premiere of a new Richard Nelson three-play cycle, THE GABRIELS: Election Year in the Life of One Family, has been added to the 2015-2016 downtown season. Written and directed by Nelson, Play One: HUNGRY will begin previews on Saturday, February 27 and run through, Sunday, March 20, with an official press opening on Friday, March 4, 2016. As with The Apple Family Plays, each play in THE GABRIELS cycle will feature a core acting company and will open on the day it is set and unfold in real time over a couple of hours. The second play in the cycle will open in September 2016 and the final play will open on Election Night November 8, 2016.

"Richard Nelson's The Apple Family Plays were one of the landmark achievements of the American theater's last decade," said Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. "The Public is thrilled to continue the investigation of ensemble based, historically immediate plays by one of our master writer/directors."

Nelson and company members Jon DeVries, Mariann Mayberry, Sally Murphy, Jesse Pennington, Maryann Plunkett, and Jay O. Sanders recently completed a highly acclaimed European tour of The Apple Family Plays to The FIND Festival at the Schaubuhne Theater in Berlin; The May International Festival in Weisbaden, Germany; The Brighton Festival in the United Kingdom; and the Vienna Festival in Austria. Of the plays on tour, Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote, "the plays present the rare spectacle of a tight-knit American ensemble at work. We seem to be not so much watching a play as eavesdropping on life itself." The Apple Family Plays at The Public were the 2012 recipient of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance and the 2012 Obie Award for Performance for Sweet and Sad. The plays were filmed by PBS and aired in 2014.

In the spirit of The Apple Family Plays and shining an important spotlight on the upcoming 2016 political election year, Tony Award-winning playwright and director Richard Nelson returns to The Public with his latest three-play cycle, THE GABRIELS. Subtitled Election Year in the Life of One Family, the first play in the cycle, HUNGRY, will premiere in March 2016 and will introduce us to the Gabriels of Rhinebeck, New York. (The Gabriels live just around the corner from the Apple Family). These three new plays will track the lives of the Gabriels throughout the coming presidential election year with the final play opening in real time on Election Night, November 8, 2016. To the rhythm of peeling, chopping and mixing, HUNGRY places us in the center of the Gabriels' kitchen. The family discusses their lives and disappointments, and the world at large and nearby, as they struggle against the fear of being left behind and the challenge to find resilience in the face of loss.

RICHARD NELSON (Playwright/Director) returns to The Public with The Gabriels after the acclaimed 2013 run of The Apple Family Plays: Scenes from Life in the Country (That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry, Regular Singing). His additional credits for The Public include Conversations in Tusculum. His other plays include Oblivion, Nikolai and the Others, Goodnight Children Everywhere (Olivier Award Best Play), Two Shakespearean Actors, Some American Abroad, Madame Melville, New England, Frank's Home, Rodney's Wife, Franny's Way, The General from America, The Vienna Notes, and others. His musicals include James Joyce's The Dead, for which he won a Tony Award; and My Life with Albertine. His films include Hyde Park on Hudson, Ethan Frome, and Sensibility and Sense. He is a recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has produced ten of his plays.

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