America's Most Poignant Home Videos! The Public's Apple Family Plays will be Filmed for PBS

Couldn’t catch enough of the cathartic drama from Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays: Scenes From Life in the Country? Have no fear, every play of the four-part series is being filmed for PBS’s WNET station in New York to be broadcast at a later date. Directed by David Horn, fans will be invited to attend the tapings by Thirteen Productions LLC the week of December 16. The shows are playing in repertory at the Public through December 15.

“The Apple Family Plays are an amazing writing achievement, but they have also been blessed with one of the greatest ensembles New York has seen in recent years,” said the Public’s Artistic Director Oskar Eustis in a statement. “We are delighted that these exquisite performances will be captured."

Each year since 2010, Tony Award winner Nelson has premiered a new play at The Public Theater about the fictional, liberal Apple family of Rhinebeck, New York. The compelling plays are about family, politics, change, and the way we live today. Each of these plays originally premiered on the night on which it is set. In That Hopey Changey Thing, the Apples reflect on the state of their family and discuss memory, manners and politics as polls close on mid-term election night 2010 and a groundswell of conservative sentiment flips Congress on its head. In Sweet and Sad, a family brunch stirs up discussions of loss, remembrance and a decade of change. Sorry finds the Apples sorting through family anxieties and confusion on the day of electing the President. And the fourth and final play, Regular Singing, opened on the day it was set, November 22, 2013 – the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

The same actors have been featured for each play including Maryann Plunkett (as Barbara), Jay O. Sanders (Richard), Laila Robins (Marian), Jon DeVries (Benjamin), Stephen Kunken (Tim), and Sally Murphy (Jane).