What Do We Need To Talk About? Conversations On Zoom by Richard Nelson

The play takes place sometime in mid-April of 2020, a month into the shelter-in-place mandate in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the day, more or less, that the audience experiences the play (Nelson later premiered two sequels, completing what has been called his "Pandemic Trilogy") The characters—Richard, a lawyer in his late sixties who works for Governor Cuomo;Barbara, his sister, a high school English teacher who was recently hospitalized with COVID-19;Marian, an elementary school teacher and also their sister;Jane, the youngest of the Apples, who is a freelance writer;and Tim, an actor and restaurant worker, who is Jane's partner and is currently in isolation due to his coronavirus symptoms The entire sixty-minute play, which was performed only once in a live stream in real time, was presented as the Apple siblings' evening Zoom conversation Intimacy builds from the shared accumulation of known minutia;in this sense, the primary practice of the play, and what is asked of the audience, is patience