This is what devastation looks like: The Gabriels is the perfect mirror for stumpers like us. #HF17

Endless chatting at the kitchen table. While cooking. That's all they do, the brother, the sister, the ex, the two daughters-in-law and the mother of the Gabriel family. About recipes, about the old piano. About Thomas, the brother who died of parkinson's, about his wife, who due to informal care had no time to renew her doctor's degree.

All very casually, without conflict, without raised voices, without drama. And that you are nevertheless glued to their lips three times for seven quarters of an hour. It happened to me on Friday at Amsterdam's Frascati theatre at a not quite sold-out performance by American Public Theatre. There are still tickets, make sure you get your hands on them. After all, the Holland Festival has brought a hidden treasure from the States.

Six Feet Under

Acting informally and without embellishment, for a long time we down-to-earth Dutchmen thought we had the patent on that. Germans turn everything on, English pronounce their words beautifully, French exaggerate. And in American theatre, things are rather thick. Apparently, they have not been idle there for the past few decades after all. If you haven't been able to keep up with that in the theatre, think of a series like Six Feet Under. Or Law and Order. Such acting: anti-dramatic almost. Because there are actors on stage who can perfectly make you feel all that is hidden behind their facade. Actors who can expose a world with a single eye movement, a furtive smile. And cover it up again. That's what theatre is about and that's what great literature is about.

When you think of The Gabriels, also think of writer Jonathan Franzen. His extremely secure, fist-pumping masterpieces (Freedom, The Corrections) also take you inside the world of the American middle class. The Gabriel family is one such middle-class family. People with a nice education, a mop of cultural baggage, a fine family home in a small town, not exactly rural, far enough from the big city to avoid a suburb and provided with enough fresh air to avoid getting sick. Such a family that until 2007 could think that it too possessed unlimited possibilities of entering the earthly paradise.

Today's knowledge

Writer and director Richard Nelson made three plays with the same cast, in the same kitchen, in the 2016 election year. Not entirely coincidentally, 2016 was also the year when American history would take a dramatic turn, but Nelson did not know that when he started this project. He did, however, know that something was in the air.

Beautifully, these three plays are performed with the knowledge of today. This gives them something naive and painfully optimistic. It would be unthinkable to write or perform these plays like this now. 2016 may have been an election year, but it was also a year in which the world could still deal with its own woes and politics would only marginally change that.

Account

Virtually no political discussions, then, in The Gabriels. Trump's name comes up twice, Clinton's a bit more often. But always in a much broader context, and nowhere flat. In fact, the less these people talk about politics, the clearer it becomes that their lives have been, and ultimately will be, determined down to the smallest capillaries by that politics.

Because that small, cosy kitchen table existence is a ruin. The famous forgotten middle class, the people who thought in the 1990s that the stagnant growth of the baby boomer generation could be absorbed with a few gift mortgages and surprise credit cards from liberalised casino banks, that middle class is still paying the bill 10 years after the 2007 crisis. A situation that will irrevocably lead to another crisis.

Perfect mirror

The careless kitchen table conversations, the touching recollections, the things they hide, without hiding it from each other: The Gabriels is hyperrealism where, for once, as a viewer, you are not smarter than the characters, do not know more than them. A perfect mirror, then. This could be any family gathering, anywhere in our middle-class world.

The Gabriels is about us, much more than the hundred-year-old but comparable European masterpieces of Anton Chekhov or Henrik Ibsen or Strindberg. Because not only the abyss itself, but especially the way we keep that abyss hidden from each other is that much closer.