INCIDENTAL MOMENTS OF THE DAY (The Apple Family)***

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoV7FwbqLrI

Available until: 6 November 2020

Not everyone is going to appreciate every play. We’re all different people with different lives, all experiencing different versions of the same situation. I had a bit of trouble getting into Incidental Moments of the Day. It all felt a bit outside my personal experience. Some things felt a bit alien. Some things went over my head. And obviously that’s my fault for being a shallow, ignorant twentysomething.

But I did feel I was watching characters who were good people and when it did resonate with me, it resonated strongly.

Incidental Moments of the Day was written and directed by Richard Nelson and he’s done a really good job. Whether he wrote the script in natural speech or whether he just got the actors to perform it in a natural way, I am really impressed. I seriously thought it was improvised. It felt exactly like a real conversation. It was more like accidentally logging on to the wrong Zoom call than watching a play. (I feel comfortable saying that because I think that was the intention.)

Barbara, Richard, Marian (now Marian Apple Platt) and Jane are the Apple siblings. Barbara and Richard recently started sharing a home. Jane is living with an actor called Tim, who appears on a separate Zoom screen so I’m not sure they’re living together at the moment (and it TOTALLY threw me when Barbara pretended to introduce Jane and Tim to each other, I thought that meant they didn’t know each other! If you haven’t seen the first two instalments, as I haven’t, I definitely recommend reading the video description first). There’s also a younger woman called Lucy, but I didn’t take in her connection to the family.

A friend of Barbara’s called Yvonne doesn’t appear in the play, but she’s mentioned so many times, I almost feel like she was there. Yvonne seems to be one of those people who takes over every conversation and she seems to do quite a bit of that even when she isn’t present. And to be fair, some of the most interesting parts of this play were inspired by something Yvonne said. There’s a long story about a girl with a glass eye. It’s so terrible I can’t help liking it.

The characters who are on the Zoom call discuss where they are with their life at the moment. It can take them a while to get to the point and there was a lot of the play that didn’t interest me, but the good bits made me feel glad I’d watched it. Maryann Plunkett expresses Barbara’s anxieties powerfully. Richard seems to find it difficult to discuss feelings, but Jay O. Sanders shows how caring he is underneath that. Laila Robins’ brief appearance as Marian suggests she’s as worried as all the others. Lucy is another who wasn’t around for long, but I enjoyed Charlotte Bydwell’s dancing to Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. Dan Wagomer is credited as choreographer, but Lucy’s dancing gives the impression of being improvised – which isn’t an insult, I think it’s really impressive to make something look or sound improvised when it isn’t.

Jane ended up being my favourite character. The way Sally Murphy looks at everyone through the scene, listening so hard but full of compassion, is just really nice to see, especially as a lot of the characters really need someone to listen. There’s too much nastiness in the world at the moment; too many people who don’t listen. I hope Stephen Kunken’s Tom knows how lucky he is. I did have my doubts about him! It's great the way you get to know these characters, even when they're talking about something that seems unimportant.

This play’s a bit of a commitment, but it was worth it in the end.