Arts

‘The Humans’ Review: Surviving in a New World and New Medium


A couple of weeks ago, when The New York Times asked people what changes they sought in a post-pandemic theater, the pithiest answer came from the playwright Raquel Almazan. “I hope I never have to see a couch onstage again,” she wrote.

I get her point. The couch she meant is not just something to sit on; it symbolizes the kind of play that turns its back, often literally, on the world beyond the suburban picture window. Usually conventional in form and domestic in content, such plays have traditionally represented the problems of white people in a white bubble, as if Pottery Barn had become a genre.

“The Humans,” by Stephen Karam, might at first glance seem to belong to that genre, even though there isn’t a couch (or almost any other furniture) in sight. It does concern a white family — the Blakes — in a domestic setting as they celebrate Thanksgiving. The parents, Erik and Deirdre, have come to New York City from Scranton, Pa., to visit their daughter, Brigid, a would-be composer who is just moving into a basement apartment with her boyfriend, Richard, a graduate student. Also sharing the holiday meal are Brigid’s sister, Aimee, a lawyer; and Momo, Erik’s mother, lost in a fog of dementia.

First produced in New York by the Roundabout Theater Company in 2015, “The Humans” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Broadway transfer in 2016 won the Tony Award for best play. I saw it several times back then, each time finding it more gripping and terrifying. Scraping the skin off an apparently upbeat family, it revealed the many struggles, economic and otherwise, that were turning the inner lives of the Blakes into nightmares.

That reimagining is mostly successful. Hathaway’s set model became the video backdrop against which the actors, filmed in six different locations, could be digitally assembled. (This neatly solves the problem of the play’s spatial requirements; we know when characters are upstairs or down, or off in the kitchen, by where their faces appear.) The sense of isolation is of course enhanced — but so is the cacophony of the overlapping dialogue when everyone is talking straight out at the camera: all needy, none fully heard.



Shared From Source link Arts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *