Begun 12 years ago with the four-play Apple Family play series, and continued with the three plays of The Gabriels, and again last summer with A Pandemic Trilogy (three Zoom plays), Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama has followed the lives of families from a small Upstate village for over a decade, with a total of 12 plays. The Michaels, about the third family in this series, premiered in the fall of 2019 and WHAT HAPPENED?: THE MICHAELS ABROAD, Nelson’s latest and last of this series, brings the Rhinebeck Panorama to a close.
No longer in comfortable Rhinebeck, New York, the Michaels family with deep roots in the world of modern dance, are crawling out from under the deadly pandemic, which has turned life as we knew it, upside down. It is now September 8th, 2021, and we find the Michaels in Angers, France, to attend a student dance festival. Called “As hopeful as it is heartbreaking” (New York Times), the first Michaels play took us into the kitchen of Rose Michael, a celebrated choreographer, as she faced a serious illness; What Happened? brings the family back together without the presence of its matriarch, Rose. Once again we are in a kitchen, and once again we witness the making of a meal; and like its title, What Happened?, the characters are asking questions – what just happened? What now? As they cook and eat and dance.
