‘The Humans’: Eroding Family Structures

A middle-aged man with a beer belly and grocery bags walks into a two-story apartment in Chinatown, New York. He stands perfectly still in the corridor outside, lost in thought and oblivious to the shuffling feet within the apartment’s thin walls. The door swings open, and for the next hour and thirty-five minutes, silence is a rarity as the Blake family’s Thanksgiving unravels. Playwright Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” directed by Joe Mantello, showed at the Boch Center’s Shubert Theatre from Mar. 13 to 25. With its insightful exploration of mankind and its foibles, this play enters the arena of American classics, unfolding at the confluence of tradition and modernity—all over a warm turkey.

“The Humans” focuses on Erik (Richard Thomas) and Deirdre Blake (Pamela Reed), Irish-Americans who have driven down from Scranton, Pennsylvania, with Erik’s mother Fiona (Lauren Klein), who suffers from dementia, to join their daughters Aimee (Therese Plaehn), a lawyer in Philly, and Brigid (Daisy Eagan), an unemployed musician, for Thanksgiving dinner at Brigid’s new home where she lives with her boyfriend, Richard (Luis Vega).

As Richard prepares dinner downstair, Fiona lectures her daughter Brigid. Brigid’s tolerance for Deidre’s religious zeal—the kind that is endearing to strangers, but tiresome over the course of Brigid’s lifetime—wavers. Deirdre argues that a boyfriend does not entail the same commitment that a husband does, and to keep this warning fresh presents her daughter with a statue of the Virgin Mary to remind her of the sanctity of marriage. Karam’s writing produces well-developed characters, demarcating the generational differences between parents and children with elegance. From conversations on religion to depression, the Blakes’ chit-chat represents the hasty catching-up that families so eagerly engage in during gatherings.

The set is also exceptionally creative. As family members mill about the house, they often find themselves on different floors, simultaneously holding different conversations and revealing a thicker plot to the audience. While Richard describes his strange dreams to Erik downstairs, the audience learns that Aimee, talking with her sister upstairs, is struggling with a break up and a devastating case of ulcerative colitis. The set design perfectly creates a dingy New York apartment, barely furnished and complete with damp, off-white walls and roaches. The light works hand-in-hand with the setting. As the play progresses and the family’s conversations take darker turns, bulbs in the home begin to fuse, engulfing the set in an encroaching darkness.

At times, tension seems to stem from an innate incompatibility between the personalities of the family members. Erik is a no-nonsense man, for whom every problem has its answers in perseverance and hard work—and perhaps a beer. Deirdre is warm and affectionate, yet lovingly sarcastic and devout, all the while maintaining a self-awareness that perceives her daughters’ condescension. Brigid, often irate but immediately apologetic, is trying her best to be an adult. Instead she suffers, often to her own expectations, failing to attain what she thinks she deserves. Aimee, on the other hand, is hilarious, wielding her humor as a shield to push away her deep-rooted insecurities about love, and the fear she feels regarding her deteriorating health. Richard, an outsider to the history of this family, is steeped in affectionate confusion at Brigid’s tense relationship with her mother, and struggles to toe the line between loyalty to his girlfriend and his de facto mother-in-law.

Like most families, they are divided by several rifts and past disagreements left unresolved, but the strength of obligated love and compassion keeps them together. The Blakes remain close despite their incompatibility. For this reason, the tension within the play stems largely from wealth or the lack thereof. “Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” Richard says, displaying a sparkling combination of tragedy and wit. A veil of secrecy lingers throughout the majority of the play, behind which hides uncomfortable conversations about an eroding family, a lack of resources to live life better, and an unwillingness to compromise on ideologies. “The Humans” most notably, does not fall victim to the lure of excess: Pain and suffering are dealt with restraint, and a full emotional range is expressed, from uproarious comedy to throbbing rage. Together, this cast brings the chaotic, often dark reality of families to the stage, and delivers it with poignant precision.