Nelson, Richard J

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    How Richard Nelson’s ‘Our Life in Art’ Was Translated, Twice

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    Richard Nelson seemed to have found the perfect home for his play “Our Life in Art.”He had written a show about the Moscow Art Theater’s 1923 tour of the United States with its director, Konstantin Stanislavski, and was planning to have a Russian translation presented by the company’s modern leader at a performance space that Stanislavski had built on the grounds of his family’s factory.What’s more, the Brooklyn Academy of Music was interested in bringing the production to New York, where Nelson is best known as the author of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” a collection of a dozen intimate plays that document and dissect slices of American life and history through nothing more than dinner conversation.A major step toward the play’s premiere in Moscow came on Feb. 23, 2022, when the director, Sergei Zhenovach, read through it with his company. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the project, but Nelson awoke the next day to a message that read, “Something awful has happened.”Russia had invaded Ukraine.“That was it,” Nelson recalled during a recent video interview. “The war cut all ties to Russian theater, so it was over.”“Our Life in Art,” Nelson’s play about a close-knit theater troupe of the past, is being performed by a close-knit French theater troupe of the present.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesThe war, and a fresh crackdown on dissent in Russia, made “Our Life in Art” all the more necessary. Its plot, which unfurls between Moscow Art Theater performances in Chicago, examines and questions how art is navigated within world events and politics. “The play has evolved into being about itself,” Nelson said. “What’s happened while trying to get the play on has now affected how it is seen. So many people I know in Russian theater and art — it’s just a very difficult time, and all of these issues are in the air.”In the air, and finally onstage. In the end, Nelson’s play about a close-knit troupe of the past was taken up by a close-knit troupe of the present: “Our Life in Art” found a new home at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, where it is running through March 2, translated into French by that company’s director, Ariane Mnouchkine.The production has put Nelson on the other end of work he has previously done translating Russian theater classics into English with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the power couple behind many Russian literature translations in print today. So, Nelson knows that the process is more than mapping one language onto another; as with the plays by his hero and aesthetic ancestor, Anton Chekhov, it also requires the preservation of a specific, crucial sensibility.In the works of both Chekhov and Nelson, the extraordinary emerges only from the ordinary. Revelations come not in speeches, but in passing comments. And, above all, in the spirit of verisimilitude, people have true conversations. Nelson’s characters speak to one another, not to the audience. He likes to tell actors that the performance “is the relationship you have with everyone else.”That’s a level of lived-in mastery rarely seen even in naturalistic theater. Not for nothing does Nelson tend to work with the same actors as a de facto company; Jay O. Sanders and Maryann Plunkett appeared in all the Rhinebeck plays, but as members of three different families. And Sanders starred in Nelson, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”The translators got to know Nelson when he had mailed them a letter introducing himself and expressing interest in a collaboration. They later met in New York, during the release of their version of “War and Peace” about 15 years ago, and the three of them decided to embark on translating Russian theater, starting with Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”“He’s a man of very great integrity,” Volokhonsky said of Nelson, “and he has a gift for friendship.”The three quickly grew close, and built up their working relationship to translating all the major plays of Chekhov. “We would submit the text to him,” Pevear said, “and he would go through it and say, ‘My actors wouldn’t say that, what if we did it this way?’ That’s why we only wanted to do this work with a playwright. It’s not just about narrative.”So, when Nelson wrote “Our Life in Art” — a nod to Stanislavski’s book “My Life in Art” — in fall 2020, he recruited Volokhonsky to translate it. Originally, it had been planned for Lev Dodin, the artistic director of the Maly Drama Theater in St. Petersburg, but he and Nelson had different visions for the play, about whether it should be understated or eruptive, and their collaboration ended on friendly terms. Next, the show was taken up by Sergei Zhenovach before he left the Moscow Art Theater, and by that point, Volokhonsky said, her work on the show was done; anything further would be refined in rehearsals. But those never came.“To have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune,” Nelson said of working with the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesAs the play lay dormant, Mnouchkine, who had seen Nelson’s work in New York, approached him about creating something for Théâtre du Soleil. He told her that he happened to have a show about an acting company, and sent it to her. She read “Our Life in Art” overnight and decided to mount it, with him directing, as he often does with productions of his plays in the United States.Mnouchkine translated the text quickly, she said, “while he was already rehearsing” with her actors, over a luxuriously long 10 weeks last spring. “I had to go quite fast, but I needed to have this very high-standard, delicate easiness, which seems easy to say but is not easy. And I wanted to have the same rhythm as Richard.”The translation was not without its complications. Nelson doesn’t speak French, and not everyone in the Théâtre du Soleil company speaks English. A translator was an essential intermediary. He would tell the actors what was happening in a scene, and if they responded, “That’s not quite what’s here in the text,” they would together work toward a more accurate turn of phrase. They talked through complicated idioms, untranslated figures of speech and, most difficult, the difference between pronouns, a nonissue in English: When should characters who are close but still colleagues address each another as the informal “tu” or the formal “vous”?It helps that, after more rehearsals this fall, Nelson had 14 weeks with the actors, and spent that time living in the company’s home, La Cartoucherie, in the bucolic Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, seeing them behave as a true company. “There are no stage managers, there are no real designers,” he said. “The actors do everything: They clean toilets, they move furniture around. This is their home, and they own this.”The result may not have been an unequivocal success — in The New York Times, the critic Laura Cappelle found the play’s realistic conversations casual to the point of rendering historical context inaccessible — but Mnouchkine said she and her actors were “very pleased” to work with Nelson. For his part, he felt as if the most difficult translation, of his nothing-forced aesthetic, was achieved.“I’m really happy with where the play has landed,” Nelson said. “At a time when the American theater is in crisis, to have this luxury and this luck, where every day, for months and months, I am just able to focus on making theater without any other pressures or anything else going on, is a piece of profound fortune.” More

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      ‘Our Life in Art’ Review: Stanislavski’s Work and Times

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      In Paris, a new production from Richard Nelson imagines a day on tour with Konstantin Stanislavski’s theater company in 1923, but misses the historical context.What do you know about the Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavski? If your answer doesn’t go much further than “He designed a method for training actors,” you are much like the audience members who were recently mystified by parts of “Our Life in Art,” a highly anticipated collaboration between the American playwright and director Richard Nelson and Théâtre du Soleil, in Paris.Its title is a nod to “My Life in Art,” an autobiography by Stanislavski that first came out in English in the 1920s. The “Our” refers to the renowned company he co-founded, the Moscow Art Theater, which, in 1923, embarked on a lengthy tour of the United States. In this new play, presented in collaboration with the multidisciplinary Festival d’Automne, Nelson imagines a day the company spent between performances in Chicago.Onstage, Stanislavski and his 10-person ensemble — who mostly use Russian nicknames for each other — bicker, eat dinner and talk about Russia and the United States. There are oblique references to the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath; to Anton Chekhov, whose plays the Moscow Art Theater championed; and to the impact the tour and Stanislavski’s theories had on American art.But it takes much of the play to even establish that one of the characters was Chekhov’s wife. The complex historical context to “Our Life in Art” is rarely addressed head-on, and won’t necessarily be obvious to Parisian theatergoers, most of whom are also encountering Nelson’s work for the first time. While he is a prominent figure in American theater, with several dozens plays to his name (including a recent 12-part project, “Rhinebeck Panorama”), this is the first production Nelson has directed in French.The sense that “Our Life in Art” wasn’t meant for its current audience is appropriate. Nelson originally intended for the play to be performed in Russia. He made several trips to the country, in 2020 and 2021, to start work on a production there, Nelson explains in a playbill interview.Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine upended these plans. Not long afterward, the Théâtre du Soleil — one of France’s top theater companies, led by the renowned director Ariane Mnouchkine — came calling, and Nelson offered “Our Life in Art” to the company.Before the performance started, Mnouchkine explained that there were donation boxes in the hall to raise money for humanitarian relief in Ukraine. In the playbill, Nelson also said that the war had “added another dimension to the play, a feeling of powerlessness.”On opening night, there was a palpable sense of curiosity at La Cartoucherie, the company’s home in Vincennes, a Paris suburb. Mnouchkine has personally overseen nearly every production performed by the Théâtre du Soleil since 1964, and Nelson is only the third outside director to work with the troupe in 59 years. The last was Robert Lepage, from Canada, whose 2018 work “Kanata — Episode 1 — The Controversy” brought, well, controversy.The Théâtre du Soleil tends to overhaul its own venue for every new production, and “Our Life in Art” is no exception. Instead of the usual auditorium, the play is staged in a narrow space flanked by audience members on both sides. (The seating, akin to tiered pews, is exceptionally uncomfortable.)This allows Nelson, who often works in the round, to create a new level of intimacy with the actors. Whereas Mnouchkine likes sweeping, large-scale tableaux, Nelson prefers to zoom in on smaller situations and conversations.Around a large table, a couple, Nina and Vassily, trade barbs about Vassily’s cheating tendencies. Pyotr, a younger actor, is reprimanded for drinking too much and playing Lopakhin, a central character in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” too coarsely. Masha, another company member, cooks pelmeni, Russian dumplings, for a celebratory dinner, during which everyone toasts the 25th anniversary of the Moscow Art Theater.Like the company onstage, the Théâtre du Soleil is an ensemble theater, with a permanent troupe of actors and a singular vision, sustained over decades. Its players have a different kind of rapport than freelancers: When the characters sit down to eat together, their banter feels entirely natural. Nelson brings out a welcome new side of them, more casual than Mnouchkine’s directing style.“Our Life in Art” really shines when Nelson plays up the contrast between the artists’ lives and the ideological pressure they were under in the Soviet Union. The play is book-ended by two letters Stanislavski wrote to Stalin in the 1930s, read onstage by the actor Arman Saribekyan. In them, Stanislavski praises “the great Communist Party” and the “spring of life” it supposedly brought to Russian art. “That’s why I love my homeland,” he says.Saribekyan explains that Stanislavski signed the letters under duress, and that their sentiment is purposely at odds with the restrained, laconic director we witness in the play, as performed by Maurice Durozier. Stanislavski grew up in an affluent family under the czars before adjusting to the communist system after the Revolution, and Nelson touches on the “re-education” that Stanislavski had to endure.There is a sense, in “Our Life In Art,” that Stanislavski and his touring actors are trapped between ruthless American businessmen — who rig the contracts to put all the financial risk on the company — and the looming threat of being deemed unpatriotic when they go home. The artists’ interactions with Russian émigrés in the United States are reported as suspicious in the Soviet press, and clippings are sent to the company as a warning of sorts.In scenes like these, art and ideology collide. At one point, Stanislavski makes a speech about the players’ shared craft, their ability to zoom in on gestures and create art through verisimilitude, rather than through ideas. This is also what Nelson does in “Our Life in Art,” but that means that many things — from the politics of the time to shifting expectations of theater in Soviet Russia — go unexplained. Making them more accessible would only enhance the experience.Our Life in ArtThrough March 3, 2024 at the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris; theatre-du-soleil.fr. More

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      Maryann Plunkett Says Goodbye to Her Lives in Rhinebeck

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      She has portrayed three characters over the course of the 12 plays in Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama.” A decade later, it’s time to move on.Talking with the actress Maryann Plunkett recently, it was hard to know, at times, whether she was speaking as herself or Barbara, Mary or Kate — the three characters she has played over the course of Richard Nelson’s “Rhinebeck Panorama” cycle.Plunkett, 68, has, after all, spent a lot of time immersed in Nelson’s created world: She and her husband, Jay O. Sanders, have appeared in each of the Rhinebeck cycle’s 12 plays. And when the final installment, “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” closed on Sunday, she ended an 11-year journey that documented the lives of three families in upstate New York.There were the Apples, who lived through and reminisced about epochal moments in American history, such as Sept. 11, and came together on Zoom during the pandemic lockdown. Then came the Gabriels, whom Nelson visited three times during the 2016 presidential election year. And after that, the Michaels, an artistic family facing the death of its matriarch, a luminary of modern dance.Along with her husband, Jay O. Sanders, Plunkett has performed in each of the 12 Rhinebeck plays.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett, right, hugging her fellow cast member Rita Wolf before “What Happened?”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesPlunkett made her Broadway debut in 1983, replacing Carrie Fisher (herself replacing Amanda Plummer) in “Agnes of God,” and opened the musical “Me and My Girl” as the lead three years later. But while she had established herself as a New York treasure, seeing Plunkett in Nelson’s plays, with their profoundly humane intertwining of politics and family relationships, felt revelatory. Over the years, you could see the most subtle emotions float on her face; she would draw the audience in without appearing to be acting at all.Barbara, Nelson said, is “sort of the heart” of the Apple family. “And that’s very much something that comes out of Maryann just naturally,” he added. “She’s an extraordinarily truthful actor, and because of that each time it’s alive, it’s fresh, it’s real. And it’s present, it’s immediate.”With the conclusion of the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett is taking on other projects, including a new musical in development and the Kelly Reichardt film “Showing Up,” in which she plays Michelle Williams’s mother.None of that, though, makes leaving her Rhinebeck characters any easier. In a video interview from her home in Manhattan ahead of the last performance, Plunkett talked Apples and pimentos, a certain election night and moving on. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.The “Rhinebeck Panorama,” Plunkett said, “has been the experience of my lifetime.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThere are similarities among the three women you have played in the cycle, yet they are not the same people at all. How did you work it out with Richard Nelson?His writing is so specific, without giving you directions on how to do it, that you would just go: “Oh, only Barbara would say this,” or “Kate would never say this.” So it’s very clear without being obvious that, yeah, this is Barbara’s soul, this is Mary’s soul, this is Kate’s soul. I mean, who gets a chance to do a project like this in their lives? Not a lot of people. And to do it with your husband? What a gift that we have been given.And you never played a couple in the cycle.[laughs] No! We were brothers and sisters, then he was my brother-in-law, and in this one I’m the widow of his ex-wife. It was very easy to play brother and sister because we really like each other, and we’re playful with each other. I suppose in a strange way maybe you don’t want to play lovers or something because people might go “Oh, they have no chemistry together.” That would be really embarrassing.The characters all feel real, and lived in. Did anything particularly resonate with you?My mom died three weeks before our first read-through of the first Apple play. She had dementia, and I spent a lot of time with her. Uncle Benjamin, in the Apple plays, had a stroke. It wasn’t dementia, but it manifested itself in things that are similar to dementia, and I felt a great closeness. The yearning maybe was for my own mother, with the protectiveness and responsibility toward him. So much so that after the final performance of the fourth play I said to John DeVries, who played Benjamin, “I feel like I’m having to say goodbye to my mother again.”“Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know,” Plunkett said. “They will move forward.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesThe conclusion of the Gabriels trilogy, “Women of a Certain Age,” takes place on election night 2016. What was it like to do the show, at the Public Theater, that specific evening?After the play they had a reception downstairs, and they had monitors all around the lobby. I was looking at Richard, and I said, “Oh come on, how bad can it be?” And he said, “Don’t look” [laughs]. And this pall fell over the crowd. My son and his girlfriend were there, it was only the second election they had ever voted in. The next night we were, mercifully, off. When we came back on Thursday, the audience was so somber. Things that used to be a laugh line — it was just these sounds of grief.Food has played a central part in the shows. In the Gabriels plays, you even had to cook in real time. Was it hard to focus on your lines?There was a lot to prepare: Slicing a sausage or an onion, and some things had to be in the oven by a certain time. Of course I’m not looking at a timer, it had to be in by a certain line. It’s almost like music: There is a rhythm. This one [“What Happened?”] is the first play where I have nothing to do, preparing or serving the dinner, and during rehearsal it was weird for me. “Can I do this?” “No, you can’t come in and start cooking; this isn’t your home.”Sanders, left, with Plunkett and Nelson. The trio have worked together on the Rhinebeck plays for over a decade.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesWhat has it been like to spend 11 years on this project?It has been the experience of my lifetime. Our son was in high school, and now he’s 27 years old. My mom had just died, my dad had died three and a half years before the first play. It’s crazy. When we did the 9/11 one, “Sweet and Sad,” you could tell when there were people in the audience who had perhaps lost someone because you would feel the grief. And some nights in this one, when I’m talking about Rose’s death and say it was the virus, sometimes you will hear reactions [makes a gasping sound]. And it’s very hard to just stay focused.What is it like to face down the last performance?I have to say to myself, “We’re going to do a tour” [laughs]. I can’t be self-indulgent and go “Oh my God, it’s over, poor me!” The other day during the show, I got emotional so I picked up the jar of pimentos on the table, and that grounded me. I held on to them until I finished that section. Richard’s characters feel deeply, but they are strong people and they will survive, you know. They will move forward.It looked like he was done with the Apples after four plays, but then he wrote three more for Zoom. Is the “Rhinebeck Panorama” really finished?Sad as I am to say that, yes, I believe it is. It’s this decade, in this country, and in the lives of these three families. And the decade is over, plus one. More

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      Richard Nelson’s New Play Closes a Chapter of Theater History

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      “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad” is the 12th and final installment in the quiet yet sweeping “Rhinebeck Panorama.”A character named Kate tells a story, of a story told to her, about a man attending a play. The actors are all deaf, and they rest their cheeks and chins on a big table, which stretches out to the audience, to feel the vibration of a spinning top. From his seat, the man leans in and puts his forehead on the surface.“He wants to share in what the characters are feeling,” Kate says. “He wants to be at that table too.”Kate’s monologue is delivered almost in passing — no one onstage even responds to it — yet it reflects, in just a few lines, the mission and magic of Richard Nelson’s decade-long, 12-play project called the “Rhinebeck Panorama,” which concludes with “What Happened?: The Michaels Abroad,” opening Sept. 8 at Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe Theater.These works, written and directed by Nelson — and realized with aesthetic unity by a consistent creative team and a de facto acting company — contain the four Apple Family plays, which feature a family gathering in Rhinebeck, N.Y., on days that happen to be of national significance; the Gabriels trilogy, about another Rhinebeck household that we visit at three points during the 2016 election year; three pandemic Zoom plays that revisit the Apples as they talk through collective trauma in real time; and a two-part exploration of the Michaels, an artistic family on the verge, then the other side, of immense loss.Charlotte Bydwell in one of several dance scenes in “What Happened?,” which takes place after the death of a dance luminary.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlong the way, Nelson has established a style of theater that has its roots in Chekhov: not naturalistic or realistic, but, as Nelson said in a recent interview, an attempt at verisimilitude. Through the dozen plays he makes a case — in our cultural moment of polarized absolutes — for questioning, nuance and, above all, conversation as a way to connect people, process the unknown and ultimately be in the world.“Centuries from now, when people want to know what a certain class of person lived like in America, they’ll go to Richard’s plays,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produced nearly all of the panorama. “The characters are individual, yet they capture the shape of our time.”The plot of each Rhinebeck play couldn’t be more simple: A family prepares or eats dinner. Conversations are discursive, guided more by the timeline of the meal than anything else; but within them are sprawling and subterranean dramas that reveal themselves through ordinary discussion rather than traditional theatricality. Conflicts are rare — raised voices, even rarer.If the series has a broad arc, it is in how the characters relate not just to time, but to place: the Apples find a home in Rhinebeck, while the Gabriels are pushed out of it and, the Michaels, by the end, are assembling around a table in France.“Rhinebeck is a complicated place, as all places are,” said Nelson, who has lived in the Hudson Valley town since the early 1980s. “You take something small, and you just look at it enough, and you see all the pieces and all the things.”The plays have all been set on the days when they open. But despite that specificity of time and location — and a milieu of predominantly white, educated people — they have achieved broad resonance, including international adaptations and imitations. And by being presented in the round in small spaces, they also elicit the intimacy of a private gathering.From left, Jay O. Sanders, Nelson and Maryann Plunkett — whom Nelson called “the beating heart” of the Rhinebeck plays.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJay O. Sanders, who along with his wife, Maryann Plunkett — “the beating heart” of the panorama, as Nelson called her — has starred in all 12 plays, recalled asking a question during “The Gabriels” that was promptly answered by a man in the audience who, like the one in Kate’s story, seemingly wanted to join them at the table.But that is the effect of Nelson’s style, in which no arguments are made and people represent nothing; as Sanders said, “The drama of just living is enough.” In a note for “What Happened?” Nelson includes a telling quote from a hero of his, the early-20th-century theater artist Harley Granville-Barker:One is tempted to imagine a play — to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle — from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do.Easier imagined than done. Nelson said that any time he has written a line that sounds like him or his beliefs, it gets cut. “The truth,” he added, “comes from the characters speaking to another character, and not for the audience to overhear.”In rehearsals, actors are directed to talk as they would at home, not to project as they typically would. They are aware, at all times, of where they are directing their questions or lines. In real life, Nelson said, rarely does someone speak to an entire room; so his characters don’t either.“It’s very unusual,” Sanders said. “And it takes a lot of courage.”The plays have flashes of prescience and recognition. You can, for example, trace former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s career through the seven Apple plays, which open in media res with an expletive and mention of his name. The first installment of “The Gabriels,” from early March 2016, includes the now-haunting line, “Don’t you feel something really bad is going to happen?”At times, though, Nelson’s characters — and perhaps Nelson himself — have been unequipped to deal with history in the making. The Apples gathered on Zoom in early July 2020, amid the upheaval of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the theater industry, platitudes reigned; but in Rhinebeck, a group of white people didn’t really know how to talk about it.Their not thoroughly engaging with Black Lives Matter frustrated some in the moment, including The New York Times’s critic, Jesse Green. But that wouldn’t fit Nelson’s approach to theater. Instead, the Apples ask questions with no answers, and are quietly saddened by a world that might be passing them by.“What you don’t want to do is make an argument,” Nelson said. “I don’t think my characters are confident about what’s going on. Everybody has their own journey.”Plunkett and Sanders, center, seen here in the 2011 play “Sweet and Sad,” have acted in the entire “Rhinebeck Panorama.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat tension arises again in “What Happened?” — “I don’t know” is a common line — the first of the staged Rhinebeck plays not to be produced by the Public. (Presented by Hunter Theater Project, it is being underwritten by a single donor, Susie Sainsbury. The second two Zoom plays were also independently produced.)There are no bad feelings between Nelson and the Public; the separation was a matter of logistics. “He was not going to let a pandemic slow him down,” Eustis said of Nelson. “It was sad for me that for the first time, I couldn’t keep up with him. So on a level it breaks my heart that this is not at the Public.”Nelson felt that “What Happened?” couldn’t wait any longer. He had written a version last year for a live theater season that never came, with politics on his mind as the election approached. But he rewrote it to open now, as live theater re-emerges in New York. Gone are any mentions of the current or former president; instead the loss presaged by the first play in 2019 — the matriarch, a modern dance luminary named Rose Michael, has cancer — permeates its sequel.That, in addition to the setting of Angers, France, makes for a departure from the panorama. “What Happened?” may be a mirror of the present, with characters regularly sanitizing their hands and sharing how they passed time in lockdown, but its preoccupations are also comparatively abstract: the loss of life, of youth, of work.And of Rhinebeck itself. Plunkett said that during a recent rehearsal it hit her: “I found myself tearing up. This specific place that we resided in and explored for a decade — not many people have gotten to do that, and I’m very fortunate. You realize how short a decade is.”Nelson may return to Rhinebeck in the future — he has written a television series of Chekhov stories set there in the present — but for now “What Happened?” is the last time he is bringing a family together at a dinner table to weave, as the critic Ben Brantley once wrote, “momentous history in the fabric of the quotidian.”The audience is, as always, invited to the table. “We’re living in a moment of confusion, tragedy and loss, but together,” Nelson said. “We are not alone.” More