What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad
by Richard Nelson

Subtitled CONVERSATIONS IN ANGERS, FRANCE, this play is Part Two of The Michaels duology.

No longer in comfortable Rhinebeck, New York, the Michaels family with deep roots in the world of modern dance, are crawling out from under the deadly pandemic, which has turned life as we knew it upside down.

It is now September 8th, 2021, and we find the Michaels in Angers, France, to attend a student dance festival.

Critics Pick.

"Extraordinary … [Nelson's] stripped-down dramaturgy asks us to care about character more than story, and to see the largest matters in the smallest details."

—Jesse Green, The New York Times

"In this beautiful capstone work, the sense is not so much a resolution as a dissolving; the characters of WHAT HAPPENED?

Have become unmoored, as if the isolation of the pandemic has caused some permanent psychic dislocation."

—Peter Marks, The Washington Post

Five Stars.

"WHAT HAPPENED?

Shines a fierce light on COVID's devastating impact …" —Elysa Gardner, New York Stage Review

Five Stars.

"Playwright Richard Nelson completes what he calls his Rhinebeck Panorama with WHAT HAPPENED?: THE MICHAELS ABROAD [which] might be the most powerful of them all … As with the other installments in the series, WHAT HAPPENED?

Will likely be widely produced …" —Steven Suskin, New York Stage Review

"This is a play about loss, the inevitable changes wrought by time and circumstance, and finding a way to go on, however haltingly.

We may never know fully what happened, but we do go on, and sharing this reality with this family — transforming life into art — lets us know that whatever we went through all those months, we were not alone."

—Christopher Byrne, Gay City News

"WHAT HAPPENED?: THE MICHAELS ABROAD [is] something of a socio-document that can and should be studied for years to come by those who want to know what life was like 'during the pandemic.'" —J K Clarke, Theater Pizzazz

"Each new piece [of Nelson's series, The Rhinebeck Panorama

] has felt like a cool blast of civilization in a world gone mad."

—David Barbour, Lighting Dimensions