Family dysfunction sits front and center in ‘The Humans’
“The Humans” comes to San Francisco with an almost exhausting list of bona fides.
Now playing at the SHN Orpheum Theatre for a twoweek engagement, Stephen Karam’s play won Tony, Obie and Drama Desk Awards for best or outstanding play and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Just last week it was on The New York Times’ list of the 25 best American plays of the last 25 years. That’s a whole lot to live up to.
Karam is the screenwriter of the new film of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” He’s also the author of “Speech & Debate,” which Aurora Theatre Company produced in 2010, and “Sons of the Prophet,” which New Conservatory Theatre did in 2016.
“The Humans” premiered in Chicago in 2014. SHN has brought to town the touring version of the Roundabout Theatre Company production directed by Joe Mantello that won such acclaim off-Broadway in 2015 and on Broadway in 2016. Only one actor remains fromthe original New York cast: Lauren Klein, who plays the dementia-plagued grandmother in a wheelchair, speaking only in increasingly agitated repeated phrases. (Former San Francisco actor Cassie Beck was also in that Roundabout cast.)
The real star of the show is the huge but run- down, barely furnished Manhattan Chinatown duplex apartment shown in David Zinn’s Tony Award-winning two-level set, with a spiral staircase and a conspicuous tangle of fuse boxes. It’s a tempestuous place, with thunderous booming noises coming from upstairs in Fitz Patton’s effectively unnerving sound design and Justin Townsend’s lights burning out frequently with a thunk.
This is the new apartment of Brigid and her boyfriend Richard, who have barely begun to move in, and now her whole family is coming over from Scranton, Pennsylvania, for Thanksgiving. It’s not going well.
Portrayed with mounting exasperation by Daisy Eagan (a Tony winner at age 11 for “The Secret Garden”), Brigid keeps getting riled by half the things her parents say, especially her mother. Both parents are constantly kvetching and undermining, whether it’s about New York, the apartment or Brigid’s life choices.
When he’s not making loud pronouncements about his children’s hoity-toity expectations from life, father Erik keeps plunging into seemingly pointed, brooding silences. As played by Richard Thomas (whom many may recall as John-Boy from “The Waltons”), Erik clearly has a lot on his mind that he’s not saying.
Eager- to- please Richard ( Luis Vega, who was in “Campo Maldito” at the EXIT Theatre a couple of years ago) keeps making exquisitely awkward attempts to strike up conversation with Erik, comically thwarted by how little they have in common aside from Brigid and some bizarre nightmares.
Masterfully portrayed by Pamela Reed (of “Kindergarten Cop” and “Parks and Recreation”), mother Deirdre bounces from one hilariously uncomfortable subject to another, whether it’s morbid hometown gossip or unsubtle hints about marriage.
Therese Plaehn (who was in Theatre Works’ “Crimes of the Heart” last year) brings her own palpable discomfort to the party as Brigid’s sister Aimee, who’s dealing with an avalanche of personal, professional and physical collapses in her life.
In fact, disappointments loom over the whole gathering like a dark cloud. Everyone in the family is disappointed either in each other or in themselves, usually both, and it keeps coming out in sharp comments and moments of solitary hauntedness. As much as the members of this Irish family drive each other up the wall, there’s clearly a lot of tenderness, too, even if they’re too stubborn to express it outside of holiday rituals of thankfulness.
More a case study of behavior than a story, Karam’s play lays the family’s dysfunction bare and doesn’t concern itself with resolutions. A seemingly supernatural element seems to come out of nowhere late in the play, though it substantially adds to the atmosphere. Certainly it’s a play about being haunted, by failure and other traumas, and it resonantly illustrates how everyone’s alone in that together.