Theatre in Review: Sorry (Public Theater)

	Jon DeVries and Maryann Plunkett. Photo. Joan Marcus

If you want to experience really fine ensemble acting, you can't do better than the cast of Sorry. Appearing for the third time as the beleaguered Apple family -- classic New York liberals struggling with a changing world and faced with making a terrible decision -- each member of this superb quintet has honed his or her technique to the vanishing point, resulting in an astonishingly naturalistic style. It's the fine art of minimalism, practiced by masters: Each thwarted gesture, pregnant pause, and sideways comment comes packed with meaning, yet nothing seems overthought or contrived. In scene after scene, so much is left unsaid, yet so much is communicated. It's no wonder that the audience at Sorry listens so intently; a single word can reveal volumes.

Of course, we've grown to know the Apples over several years, and the familiarity has only bred fascination. This is the third in Richard Nelson's four-play cycle, each written against the background of a significant political event. So far, we've had two elections and the tenth anniversary of 9/11; Nelson keeps each script current, adding references to real events right up until opening night. Personal crises and political angst are woven into a tangle of events that possess the quality of real life; disappointed in their marriages and careers, the Apple siblings, who came of age in a more idealistic era, find themselves strangers in an America altered beyond their recognition. With each update on their fortunes, Nelson balances domestic concerns -- both trivial and terrible -- and tectonic social shifts with an ease that is rarely evident in contemporary American drama.

By now, Nelson has woven an intricate web of resentments and dependencies that binds and defines the members of this clan. Once again, we meet up with Barbara, a schoolteacher whose free time is spent caring for her uncle, Benjamin, a once-famous actor who has retreated almost totally into a fog of dementia. Saintly on the surface and simmering underneath, Barbara embraces her crushing responsibilities with a martyr's wrath. Living with them is the sharp-tongued Marian, who, three years later, still struggles to heal after her daughter's suicide and the subsequent collapse of her marriage. Visiting them are Jane, a would-be writer -- she is perennially seeking a publisher for her book about the history of manners -- and Richard, a lawyer, who, disgusted with politics, has traded in his job in the state attorney's office for an equally unsatisfying career in the private sector. Missing this time around is Tim, Jane's boyfriend, an actor who, well into his 40s, still supplements his career by working as a waiter. (Shuler Hensley, who plays Tim, is otherwise engaged this fall, starring in The Whale at Playwrights Horizons.) But he is still very much a presence, as Jane, with no small degree of ambivalence, is weighing a move, with him and his daughter, to Rhinebeck, New York, where Barbara and Marian live.

Sorry is set on November 6 of this year, and, along with the election, focuses on the fact that the time has come to move Benjamin to an assisted living facility. (Violently opposed to the idea initially, he now seems unaware that it is in the offing; this does little to assuage Barbara's guilt.) Sadly, Benjamin -- who is clearly the closest thing any of them has to a father figure -- is devolving to a point beyond their control. This becomes evident in a remarkable scene in which Barbara, desperate to prove that Benjamin's mind still functions, invites him to read aloud from his journal, much of it written in an earlier, more lucid period. Reading, he describes his own anguish over his failing powers in a tone that is supremely detached at first, but a gradually rising tension in his voice and darkening in his eyes suggest that an unknowing fury lurks deep inside. Several pages have been ripped out of the journal; these detail incidents in which he has spied on Barbara in the nude or made inappropriate advances at her. Interestingly, he appears to have done so under the delusion that Barbara is her late mother; one feels that Nelson is setting up further shocks for the Apples to absorb.

At the same time, the election looms and fresh anxieties about an uncertain world eat at their tattered souls. Richard, perhaps the most disaffected, expresses his revulsion for a political system in which "most people seem to just want somebody who can articulate their hatreds." Jane, in a voice suffused with disappointment, wonders, "When did sacrifice become something foolish? Or have I just woken up to this, and it's always been this way?" She sees her 22-year-old son and his friends as a lost generation, stuck in dead-end jobs -- if they have jobs at all -- and destined to be left behind even if the economy improves. Marian has little patience left for a teaching career where the rewards diminish daily. She says, "The faith we once had in ourselves as professional teachers, it's been ruined. By all the rankings, those tests."

It's a brave new world for them all, and we're lucky that Nelson, who also directed, has assembled such an intelligent and dexterous ensemble of actors willing to make a multi-year commitment to these characters. Jay O. Sanders provides much of the play's bountiful humor as Richard, whose well-intentioned, but usually clueless, statements are treated by his sisters with withering scorn. (His attempt at delighting Barbara with a surprise appearance is quickly sabotaged by her enraged response; his cowardly accomplices, Marian and Jane, immediately renounce any responsibility.) Sanders also turns a long speech about the bizarre events surrounding the inauguration of Franklin Pierce into a lovely, creepy ghost story. Maryann Plunkett once again captures Barbara's bustling manner and the festering anger underneath; she is also heartbreaking when she presses a photo of herself on Benjamin, hoping he will forgive her for sending him away. Laila Robbins is properly coruscating as Marian, but her finest moment comes when, breaking a powerful, and disturbingly long, pause, she finally uses the word "suicide" in connection with her daughter. J. Smith-Cameron's Jane is, in many ways, the saddest of them all, as she takes stock of the dwindling options available to her. And Jon DeVries is once again a quietly powerful presence as Benjamin, looking on at the others with a benevolence that, at any given moment, may be love or sheer incomprehension.

Once again, Nelson has assembled the team of Susan Hilferty (set and costume design), Jennifer Tipton (lighting), and Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens (sound), and all of them deliver solid, subtly detailed work. But the real wonder here is the marvelous ensemble, whose members, with such apparent ease, create the illusion of lives bound together by decades of love, losses, and tarnished hopes. Listen to them closely; they have so much to say. --David Barbour