The Humans

[edjames]

A beautifully written, funny and touching play. Great cast. Now on Broadway. 1 hour and 40 minutes, no intermission.

 

This review is from it's off-Broadway run.

 

Review: ‘The Humans,’ a Family Thanksgiving for a Fearful Middle Class

The Humans

 

By CHARLES ISHERWOODOCT. 25, 2015

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From left, Reed Birney, Cassie Beck, Jayne Houdyshell, Sarah Steele, Lauren Klein, and Arian Moayed in this comedy-drama by Stephen Karam, which opened on Sunday. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

• A middle-class family seems to be spiraling toward perilous entropy in “The Humans,” the blisteringly funny, bruisingly sad and altogether wonderful play by Stephen Karam that opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, in a superlative Roundabout Theater Company production.
   
  Written with a fresh-feeling blend of documentarylike naturalism and theatrical daring, and directed with consummate skill by Joe Mantello, Mr. Karam’s comedy-drama depicts the way we live now with a precision and compassion unmatched by any play I’ve seen in recent years. By “we” I mean us non-one-percenters, most of whom are peering around anxiously at the uncertain future and the unsteady world, even as we fight through each day trying to keep optimism afloat in our hearts.
   
  The play turns on a staple of American drama: the family gathering. This can lead to canned laughter or trumped-up histrionics, but the Blakes, who assemble in Manhattan for Thanksgiving dinner, are drawn with such specificity and insight that we are instantly aware that we are in safe hands. (Mr. Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet,” seen on the same stage, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)
   
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  Top floor, from left, Cassie Beck and Sarah Steele, and bottom, from left, Reed Birney, Arian Moayed and Jayne Houdyshell in “The Humans.” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
  These could be people we all know, a family with strong bonds, small subterranean resentments and the kind of troubles tearing at the fabric of the American middle class — which is to say money problems. But Mr. Karam’s play, like Annie Baker’s recent “John,” also contains shivery hints of the uncanny, reminders that the world is a mysterious place, not necessarily built for the comfort of the humans who seem to rule it.
   
  Dinner is hosted by the youngest Blake sibling, Brigid (Sarah Steele), and her boyfriend, Rich (Arian Moayed), at their new apartment in Chinatown. It’s a duplex, but one made from combining a dark basement apartment with the almost equally dark unit upstairs. In David Zinn’s terrifically detailed two-tiered set, a spiral staircase connects the floors, and the action moves between them almost constantly.
   
  The rest of the family has come from Pennsylvania: Brigid’s parents, Erik (Reed Birney) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), along with Erik’s mother, called Momo (Lauren Klein), all from Scranton; and Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), from Philadelphia, where she works as a lawyer.
   
  As the family members greet one another and housewarming gifts are given, the anatomy of the clan comes through as if in a clear X-ray: Erik and Deirdre toil at the kind of unspectacular jobs that have supplied a solid middle-class living (or the kind that used to, anyway). He’s worked for nearly 30 years at a private school, mostly in maintenance; she’s been an office manager at the same firm for even longer.
   
  They take care of Momo, who is in a wheelchair and has dementia, but they cannot afford to hire someone to help, even as she becomes ever more subject to wild fits of temper. (Ms. Klein is remarkable as Momo, who sleeps through much of the dinner but occasionally begins muttering darkly, or flares up into one of her fits.)
   
  As he engages in getting-to-know-you chat, Erik remarks, “I’ll tell you, Rich, save your money now … I thought I’d be settled by my age, you know, but man, it never ends … mortgage, car payments, Internet, our dishwasher just gave out.” He then adds, in a line as bleak as it is funny, “Don’tcha think it should cost less to be alive?”
  
  • All the actors in “The Humans” are at their best. Ms. Houdyshell’s bubbly humor and warmth are, as always, immensely pleasurable; like Mr. Birney, she’s incapable of a dishonest word or action. Ms. Beck and Ms. Steele have a nice sisterly rapport, as the women share laughs over their mother’s strange barrage of texts and emails. (“You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself,” Brigid says, referring to a recent dispatch from Mom to Aimee.) Mr. Moayed has one of the smaller roles, but he provides Rich with an amiable gravity and intimations of emotional troubles he once faced.
     
    Mr. Mantello orchestrates the complicated action and shifting emotional currents with admirable dexterity; this may be his finest work in an already distinguished career. For while “The Humans” is on the surface a realistically drawn play about a family facing various crises, Mr. Karam employs this familiar formula to look more deeply at the ways we are all at the mercy of fate and circumstance.
     
    Erik had accompanied Aimee on a job interview in Lower Manhattan on 9/11; he still recalls the terrifying two hours it took for them to find each other amid the chaos. He’s not too comfortable with Brigid’s moving into a basement apartment in a potential flood zone, either. His grandmother died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, just blocks away.
     
    And Brigid sums up one of Deirdre’s emails to her daughters, with a link to a science article, thus: “Happy Tuesday, oh and just F.Y.I.: At the subatomic level, everything is chaotic and unstable … Love, Mom.”
     
    The fragility of human life and all it contains is a recurring theme, and it accelerates as the drama darkens — literally. In addition to strange, loud thuds from somewhere above (it sounds like the footsteps of an angry or indifferent god), the apartment grows dimmer as one light after another mysteriously blinks out.
     
    By the end of Mr. Karam’s haunting, beautifully realized play — quite possibly the finest we will see all season — the apartment has emptied; there’s not a single human being left on a stage suddenly plunged into total darkness, as if a black hole had swallowed up the Blake family before the turkey has even had time to cool.
     
     
    

[+ beethoven]

Well, Mr. Isherwood, whose reviews I usually like, is more than a little over the top IMHO. However, I liked the play and recommend it.

[Doe Be Doe]

I found it moving and personal in a few spots.

[edjames]

The reviews are in...

 

Review: ‘The Humans’ Depicts a Family, and a Country, Under Pressure

The Humans

 

 

By CHARLES ISHERWOODFEB. 18, 2016

 

 

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/02/19/arts/19HUMANSJP/19HUMANSJP-master675.jpg

Top from left, Jayne Houdyshell, Lauren Klein and Arian Moayed, and bottom, from left, Reed Birney, Sarah Steele and Cassie Beck — on David Zinn’s set — in “The Humans.” CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

 

“Doing life twice sounds like the only thing worse than doing it once,” says the beleaguered paterfamilias of “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s piercingly funny, bruisingly sad comedy-drama about an American family teetering on the edge of the abyss.

 

The title may sound generic, but there’s nothing blurry about Mr. Karam’s scorching drama, which opened on Broadway on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Drawn in subtle but indelible strokes, Mr. Karam’s play might almost qualify as deep-delving reportage, so clearly does it illuminate the current, tremor-ridden landscape of contemporary America.

 

The finest new play of the Broadway season so far — by a long shot — Mr. Karam’s drama has been beautifully transferred from Off Broadway, where it was presented by the Roundabout Theater Company last fall, with the production’s prized virtues intact: a peerless cast, whose members all inhabit their characters as if they’ve been living in their itchy skins forever; direction from Joe Mantello that stealthily navigates the play’s delicate shifts, from witty domestic comedy to painful conflict, and from there to something resembling a goose-pimply chiller; and a set, designed by David Zinn, that perfectly captures the unsettled atmosphere the writing so deftly establishes.

The sturdy bones of the play are familiar: On one level, it is a classic tale of a fractious family gathering, seasoned with squabbles over those topics that we are all advised to avoid, and rarely do, like money, religion, class and what the kids are doing wrong with their lives. The play takes place in a prewar apartment in Chinatown, where three generations of the Blake family are assembling for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Newly rented and still awaiting delivery of the furniture, the apartment is home to Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed), who proudly point out its spaciousness — or its comparative spaciousness, anyway. Any New York apartment that includes a spiral staircase pretty much qualifies as spacious, although, as Brigid’s mother and father cannot help noting, the bottom half is a windowless basement.

 

Reed Birney) — the fellow who doesn’t see another turn on life’s carousel as a happy prospect — is more encouraging, although he also seems preoccupied. Deirdre and Erik have driven in from Scranton, Pa., bringing along Erik’s mother, called Momo (Lauren Klein), who is in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. Although everyone showers tender care on her, Momo is having one of her “bad days,” as Erik puts it, only rousing from her near-slumber to mutter incomprehensibly. (Ms. Klein gives a remarkable performance, admirably free of showboating or sentiment.) Nor is she the only family member in ill health: Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), has ulcerative colitis.

An atmosphere of slightly forced gaiety barely covers the sense of peril that subtly gathers in the dining room as we learn more about the pressures bearing down upon the family. Aimee’s ill health has cost her job at a law firm. Brigid, an aspiring composer, is working two bartending jobs as she faces piles of student debt.

After toiling for 28 years in various capacities at a private school, Erik is facing uncertain prospects, too. His wife, an office manager, now answers to bosses decades younger than she is, who make much more money.

 

Photo

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From left, Cassie Beck, Arian Moayed, Reed Birney, Jayne Houdyshell, Lauren Klein and Sarah Steele in Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” which opened Thursday at the Helen Hayes.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Birney’s excellence, but his performance here moved me so deeply I find myself reaching for new superlatives. Well, I’ll skip those careworn things and merely say that without for a moment distorting the delicate emotional textures of the writing, he draws a heart-rending portrait of a loving husband, father and son slowly withering inside, in a state of bemused bewilderment at the unforeseen turns his life has taken.

 

Ms. Houdyshell has received her share of hosannas from me, too, and deserves another bushel-ful for her exquisitely funny Deirdre. A modest woman of great heart and spirit, Deirdre, perhaps more than any other member of the family, has weathered the storms she and her husband have endured with a stolid equanimity, in part because she still trusts in the good Lord to see them through.

 

No less fine are Ms. Steele as the antsy Brigid, who cannot keep a damper on her simmering differences with her mother, and Ms. Beck, whose Aimee, still reeling from the loss of her longtime girlfriend, tries to brush off her depression with self-mocking humor. And while his role is comparatively small, Mr. Moayed’s fine contribution to the ensemble should not be overlooked, as Richard plays the mediator in the conflicts.

 

Mr. Karam underscores his themes, of life’s fragility, and our vulnerability to forces beyond our control, with inspired symbolism that nevertheless doesn’t break with the play’s keenly observed realism. But I’ll leave the nerve-rattling bits to surprise audiences.

 

With or without those ominous suggestions that the American family as we know it is under existential threat, “The Humans” is a major discovery, a play as empathetic as it is clear-minded, as entertaining as it is honest. For all the darkness at its core — a darkness made literal in its ghostly conclusion — a bright light shines forth from it, the blazing luminescence of collective artistic achievement.

 

And, short and sweet by NYPost, but nevertheless just as good:

 

‘The Humans’ is now the unexpected Tony front-runner

By Elisabeth Vincentelli

February 19, 2016 | 9:00am

 

A scene from "The Humans." Photo: Joan Marcus

MORE FROM:

ELISABETH VINCENTELLI

 

 

As modest as Stephen Karam’s play sounds, producer Scott Rudin immediately got the rights after seeing it off-Broadway this fall.

 

Given its clichéd premise, it’s amazing what the playwright and director Joe Mantello pull off here. The show deals with heavy issues: caring for aging parents, economic distress, heartbreak, student debt, infidelity. And yet “The Humans” isn’t a downer.

 

Set in a ramshackle Chinatown apartment, it’s often startlingly funny, and keeps an emotional grip on its audience throughout. On a different scale, it’s a bit like when “August: Osage County” hit us all in the gut. The ending even adds a whiff of quasisupernatural terror that somehow doesn’t feel out of place.

 

Aside from the sharp, nuanced writing, credit must go to the ensemble, thankfully intact from the earlier production. It’s hard to single anybody out, but what Reed Birney and Jayne Houdyshell do as the parents is just extraordinary — without ever looking as if they’re actually doing anything. They’re like the show as a whole, moving stealthily and laying waste to your heart.