In 2014, Richard Nelson’s tetralogy of Apple Family plays was one of the flagship events of the Brighton Festival; this year, he returns with a trilogy (ticketed individually or collectively) featuring the Gabriel family from the same upstate New York village of Rhinebeck. As with the earlier work, each individual play is set on a politically significant date and received its opening performance on that date. In this case, the trilogy is subtitled Election Year In The Life Of One Family; Hungry is set following the primaries’ Super Tuesday in March 2016, What Did You Expect? in mid-September just after Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia wobble, and Women Of A Certain Age on November 8, election night (the action of the play ends before the polls close).

Nelson stresses that the play is “about” the year, not (or not just) the election itself. The middle-aged and elderly women of the Gabriel family and their brother George are liberals and Clintonites, but in the first two plays the election is only mentioned in the final phase; in over five hours of total playing time, the T-word is uttered only once, 15 minutes before the end, with the Republican candidate being referred to at other times simply as “Him”, like a kind of political Voldemort. The conversation, as on each occasion they prepare a family dinner, deals with bereavement (in March they have just returned from scattering the ashes of elder brother and playwright Thomas – this is a well-cultured family), class and money problems: they are becoming aliens in their own home as Rhinebeck becomes a weekend colony for prosperous Manhattanites, and ultimately have to sell that home and many treasured possessions to pay for mother Patricia’s residential care.

Nelson is masterly at showing liberal values at work through casual conversation and everyday domestic work. It’s not simply a matter of their not making a drama of anything, although paradoxically this undramatic quality is what renders the plays so powerful: sister Joyce’s lesbianism is hardly mentioned even obliquely, and folk are surprised but not exercised by the amicable relations between Thomas’s widow Mary and his first ex-wife Karin (“There was one in between us; we both hate her”). Even the political dimension is often only glanced at: in a literary-historical account, “[Nathaniel] Hawthorne tells [Herman] Melville that he has stopped reading newspapers”, to which the sardonic response is “Was it an election year?” But things resonate. As meals are co-operatively prepared, we hear the frequent question “What can I do?” and also its Kennedyesque echoes.

The playwright shows himself a skilled director in this production from New York’s Public Theater, allowing talk to flow unforced and overlapping; he could, however, care more about verbal clarity even in an overhead-miked 200-odd-seater space like the Attenborough. It is a gloriously unshowy ensemble piece, although Maryann Plunkett comes out ahead by a nose as Mary. A simple yet powerful examination of what it – still, so far – means to be American, and indeed to be a human being among other human beings.

Written for the Financial Times.