A play premieres online - and it couldn’t be more relevant to how we are right now

Theater in exile does not mean a world without “theater.” That much is clear after the premiere on Wednesday of Richard Nelson’s riveting new drama, “What Do We Need to Talk About? Conversations on Zoom.” In 60 lyrical minutes, author-director Nelson and five stage-vet actors show us how potently a digital conferencing platform can work as a space for a play.

Quotation marks appear in my preceding paragraph, around the word connoting a performative art that currently is shifting to the internet - a whole field with a kind of refugee status. Because theater on the web can never really be “theater.” The cameras through which this Zoom play was live-streamed Wednesday - and will remain archived on the web through Sunday - are a filter between actor and audience. They narrow your gaze, demand you see only what the screen allows. That’s an art form based on a primarily visual experience, not a communal one.

Sitting or reclining alone in a room, disconnected from other audience members, you watch and listen to a play under different conditions. The sensation is like being entrusted individually with a secret rather than collectively hearing a shout.

But Nelson, in collaboration with the Public Theater, uses Zoom so effectively as the scaffolding of his play, you feel as if ground is being broken for a most practical use of the platform as a theater alternative. It’s the first time that I’ve sat through a digitally presented work of dramatic art that probably would not be more successful on a stage.

It’s also the first time, for me, that faces in the gallery view on Zoom truly come across as characters, rather than as actors reciting lines. This is partly attributable to the fact that the characters are so familiar to Nelson, his performers, and to us. In a series of stage plays that debuted over years at the Public, the dramatist chronicled the mealtime gatherings of these grown Apple siblings in Rhinebeck, New York. Typically, these dinners took place on significant American dates, such as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and Election Day 2016.

For “What Do We Need to Talk About?” the dramatic situation migrates to the web and our current national isolation. The time is April 2020, when the Apples are in their various homes, continuing their get-together tradition on Zoom. This one occurs on the day the oldest sibling, Barbara (Maryann Plunkett) has been released from the hospital, recovering from covid-19. The virus is never named, because why would that even be necessary?

Her brother Richard (Jay O. Sanders) is staying with Barbara. In other Zoom tiles, their sisters Marian (Laila Robins) and Jane (Sally Murphy) enter the conversation, with Jane’s partner Tim (Stephen Kunken) beaming in from another room in his and Jane’s house. Tim’s got a fever and is quarantining himself. (A sixth character, the Apples’ late uncle Benjamin, is heard on a recording in the voice of Jon de Vries.)

Rather than a play about the circumstances dictated by the virus, though, “What Do We Need to Talk About?” concerns itself more fundamentally - and entrancingly - with the deeper need we all harbor, to tell and be told stories. The talk veers in this clan of teachers, state officials, writers and actors from humdrum subjects such as grocery shopping during a pandemic to more cerebral topics like “The Decameron.” Boccaccio’s 14th-Century collection of stories, erotic and fantastical, recounted during a plague, provides a template here. The siblings go around the digital circle, entertaining one another with stories.