The Humans delves into modern family life
The Humans manages to be funny, poignant and disturbing all at once
Every generation is different from the next. But in Stephan Karam’s The Humans, the gap between the sixty-something parents and their adult children is less of a chasm, and more of a joint abyss.
Even as Erik and Deirdre Blake (played beautifully in this Citadel production by both Ric Reid and Laurie Paton) suffer their own late-life crisis in the form of bad knees and tetchy backs, their daughters are struggling with careers and relationships that are far from smooth. Platitudes passed from father to daughter, “this too, will pass,” seem flaccid. Career advice — “Are you so spoiled you can’t see you’re crying over something hard work can fix?” — merely serves to highlight the problem with this family. There has been a dramatic shift in fortunes, in dynamics. Things are broken, in several spots, and there is no ready solution.
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and awarded the Tony for best drama in 2016, The Humans is a riveting tale of love and despair. It is set in the stark, box-strewn bi-level Manhattan apartment of youngest daughter Brigid (Sara Farb), who, at 26, still dreams of being a musician and is working low-end jobs to pay the bills while she pursues her passion.
She is in the process of moving in with the amiable older man, Richard (Richard Lee in his Citadel debut), and is hosting the family gathering at Thanksgiving. Her sister, Aimee (Alana Hawley Purvis), a thirtysomething lawyer with health problems, has just broken up with her girlfriend and is struggling to get through the holidays with something like cheer. Also present is Erik’s mother Momo (Edmonton’s own Maralyn Ryan), who is in a wheelchair and has dementia, her voice alternating between garbled warnings and screams of anger and frustration. Still, she offers a glimpse of a time that was when she joins the family to say Thanksgiving grace.
Played in real-time over 90 minutes with no intermission, the play acknowledges the hardships that beset a lower middle-class family in the 21st century. The elder Blakes still labour under the weight of a mortgage and car payments; a broken dishwasher is capable of threatening equilibrium. Yet the young people, well, Brigid at least, are miffed that no financial support is coming from mom and dad to help make dreams come true.
Deirdre has her own disappointments. Her daughters have not embraced the Catholic faith, they are unmarried. She sees the world as chaos, and arrives for dinner with a care package of canned tuna and emergency lighting. But as the meal progresses, it’s clear Erik and Deirdre are harbouring a dark secret that a little caulking around baseboards can’t fix. They must share with the girls. But how and when?
The great strength of The Humans is its relatability. Other storied American family stories, from the classic Long Day’s Journey into Night, to a more modern tales such as Other Desert Cities, or August Osage County (the latter two seen in recent years at the Citadel) offer much in the way of drama around suicide, drug addiction, sheer cruelty and violence.
There is none of that in The Humans. This is an ordinary family, essentially loving and well-connected, but in turmoil as traditional social structures dissolve around them, including religion, decent jobs with pensions, and stable, if not necessarily happy, marriages.
The script is well-paced and balances tragic and comic elements of family life, producing big laughs for the audience. But it is the staging and two-tier set of The Humans that reveal much about the mechanics of the Blakes. Each family member has their own narrative arc, often occurring on different parts of the stage and sometimes concurrently.
Just like in a real family, if you turn your back on daughters scurrying off to the kitchen, something important may escape your attention. Erik is always disappearing upstairs so he can use his cellphone next to a window to catch the score, which gives him the opportunity to overhear Aimee make a desperate Happy Thanksgiving call to her former partner.
That snatched, one-sided conversation is perhaps the single most poignant scene of The Humans. Purvis brings exquisite timing to the effort as Aimee grasps for a morsel of what she and her lover once had, and is politely dismissed. You can hear muscles tense in her throat, and feel the loneliness in her forced smile.
Throughout the play, there are a host of loud thumps and eerie screeches, explained as noisy neighbours or a trash compactor, and designed to add a supernatural air to proceedings. Director Jackie Maxwell, for 12 years the helm of the Shaw Festival, and Edmonton sound designer Matthew Skopyk play these with a light hand, knowing the noise will ratchet up tension and make Momo’s behaviour at the play’s climax all the more disturbing.
Early in the play, Deirdre refers to her mother-in-law’s fits of temper as akin to something from a scary movie. This leads the hapless Richard to recall a comic series he read as a kid about a planet of monsters.
“But on their planet, the scary stories they tell each other, they’re all about us,” says Richard. “The horror stories for the monsters are all about humans.”
Each family member has their own narrative arc, often occurring on different parts of the stage and sometimes concurrently.