The Gabriels

Hungry — “A wonderful new play…may well be the most resonantly topical and emotionally engaging play of this election year. Mr. Nelson finds the weave of momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian. These works are as personal as they are political, and you cannot separate the two any more than you can in your own life.”
What Did You Expect? — “The second work in the second cycle of plays by Mr. Nelson that have quietly emerged as a sui generis triumph of civic theater… It is a testament to Mr. Nelson’s well-honed craft, and that of his cast, that these topics are seldom addressed directly yet are embedded in the play’s every fragment. His family cycles inhabit the here and now with an unobtrusive thoroughness I’ve never encountered elsewhere in the theater.”
Women of a Certain Age — “The Gabriels, the tenderly wrought creations of the playwright Richard Nelson, along with Mr. Nelson’s earlier tetralogy, The Apple Family Plays, may collectively represent the most profound achievement in topical theater in this country since the Depression-era triumphs of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. The talk in Women never strays far from the safe foot path of casual conversation. But Mr. Nelson knows that in certain contexts, no conversation is casual…before you know it, this modest play has indirectly addressed matters both of the utmost immediate relevance, and of cosmic implications.” ~Ben Brantley, New York Times

"Richard's determination to put real life onstage, to tell the truth by avoiding all grandstanding and theatrical flourishes, has created a masterful trilogy of plays that show us, not only the way we live now, but the way we live." ~Oskar Eustis, from his Introduction