Richard Nelson has written about history past and just-future. His subjects include Christopher Columbus, Frank Lloyd Wright, George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, and Franklin Roosevelt. In his play The General from America (1996), Nelson considered the complications of Benedict Arnold’s decision to surrender West Point to the British: what does it mean to be an American in a country you think is betraying itself? Reflecting on the process of pulling together a play that examines militarism, intervention, and patriotism—current events in almost every American period—Nelson says, “With any piece of history you put pieces together—you choose what to highlight and to not highlight, as any historian does. My goal was to try to show the complexity of people. At the end of the day, I’m not someone who’s pushing an agenda, except that I think we should look at the world in complex ways and recognize ambiguity as something that is inherent in people.”
One of Nelson’s first plays, Hank Aaron’s 715th (1973), was written about Aaron beating Babe Ruth’s home-run record. The piece was written the winter before Aaron officially broke the record, but at 714 home runs, the record breaking felt “all but inevitable,” Nelson says. He wrote the piece as a memory play—set in a future, reflecting on a past that had yet to happen. “The structure of a play whose setting is concurrent with its production creates a few interesting problems,” Nelson says, “but also, one hopes, a sort of rich ‘frisson’ with the audience. Perhaps I was reading too much T.S. Eliot at the time, but I was trying to keep my audience off balance, even disoriented, so as to not allow it to settle, and to be forced to question.”
In The Apple Family Plays, Nelson interpolates the experience of everyday citizens into recorded history. “My goal with Sorry [the third Apple Family play, which premiered on Election Night 2012] wasn’t to be topical or witty like SNL or Colbert,” Nelson says. “I wanted characters—in this case an American family—talking and listening to each other about really immediate concerns. So you have the election, you have Hurricane Sandy, you have other things on their mind on November 6 2012. I wanted the writing to be very real about what this November 6 would feel like. To write plays as if they are happening at that very moment onstage is much harder than I’d expected. You have to find weight in ordinary thoughts and language.”
Nelson’s impulse to stage (near) history stems from a rich tradition running from the ancient Greeks to contemporary television show runners. Authors have exploited history for different artistic ends: using history as allegory to mirror a contemporary moment; by directly exploiting the discrepant awareness between the audience’s knowledge of what’s to come and the characters’ expectations; or to reflect on a longer arc of historical and cultural change. The following writers explore history in several in different modes.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel
Interested in reading about other historically based stories, from Euripides to Arrested Development? A full version of this story is available in the 2013-2014 Performance Guide, sold at Studio’s box office for $20. The Performance Guide is Studio’s annual literary magazine that delves into the playwrights, themes, and larger artistic and historical context of each Subscription Series Production.