“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful,” wrote the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky in his Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, “the more narrowly I limit my field of action.” This is also a poetics of theater as practiced by the American playwright Richard Nelson in his acclaimed Rhinebeck Panorama. The 12 plays that make up the Panorama—seven on the Apple family, three on the Gabriels, and two on the Michaels—have engaged Nelson since 2010, when the first Apple play appeared. And to what does Nelson limit his field of action? The kitchen tables in three homes in upstate New York, where the Apples or Gabriels or Michaels are preparing a meal and talking.
