But, while Letts used these mounting, increasingly outrageous revelations to propel the story forward, Karam subverts the family-drama formula. Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County,” which opened on Broadway in 2007, depicted an Oklahoma family dealing with every dysfunction imaginable: pill addiction, incest, infidelity, suicide.
Karam’s play is not alone in its bleak assessment of American life.
Could it be the same dark chasm hinted at in the mortality study? The tunnel of Erik’s nightmares-which gives the play its queasy final image-is one of deteriorating health, dwindling resources, and lost security. “Not cheaper when you consider how much heart disease costs once you’re hospitalized,” her daughter retorts. Deirdre waves off Brigid’s suggestion to eat more blueberries, because doughnuts are cheaper. But it’s clear that, for all of Deirdre and Erik’s folksy advice, they’re in an even deeper hole than their children. Deirdre and Erik try to cajole Brigid into moving back to Scranton, where people are nice, and Deirdre gives her a Virgin Mary statue, which she promises to keep in a “drawer somewhere.” Anyone who has seen Houdyshell onstage knows that she’s the master of a certain type: the cheerfully banal Midwestern mom who believes in the healing power of e-mail forwards and care packages. Meanwhile, a terrible clanging noise comes from upstairs-Brigid claims it’s a noisy neighbor. Her apartment is barely furnished, and the lights keep going out, forcing the family into smaller and smaller quarters. “I thought I’d be settled by my age, you know,” Erik says, “but, man, it never ends … mortgage, car payments, Internet, our dishwasher just gave out.” After a beat, he adds, “Dontcha think it should cost less to be alive?”Īll this emerges during the course of a Thanksgiving dinner, which Brigid has unwisely decided to host. From their home in Scranton, they’re staring down retirement, but their funds are disappearing as they care for Momo.
Erik is having nightmares of being lured into a dark tunnel by a woman with no face. And her parents, Deirdre and Erik (played with wonderful, hard-nosed humor by Jayne Houdyshell and Reed Birney, character actors of the highest order), are baby boomers on the brink of oblivion. Her grandmother, nicknamed Momo (Lauren Klein), is senile and prone to inchoate fits of rage. Her sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), has an intestinal disorder, a broken heart, and a dead-end career at a law firm. Like everyone in her Irish-American clan, Brigid is failing. The play is set at a sparse Chinatown duplex belonging to Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele), a hipster aspiring composer who shops at farmers’ markets, and her boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed). The entire production (under the spot-on direction of Joe Mantello) creaks and aches with pains large and small, corporal and existential, financial and digestive. (“I am deeply concerned about what’s happening in every community in America, and that includes white communities, where we are seeing an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths.”) And yet I kept thinking back to “The Humans,” with its unsparing view of American life, as if Karam were diagnosing a case of chronic spiritual arthritis. Since the play’s original run, the mortality findings have been deconstructed in op-ed pieces and were even brought up by Hillary Clinton in the February 11th Democratic debate. “The Humans,” his latest, has just opened on Broadway, at the Helen Hayes. The thirty-six-year-old playwright grew up in Scranton, in a half-Lebanese-American family not unlike the one he depicted in his play “Sons of the Prophet,” a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist. But the thought occurred to me: Karam knows something about this. The news seemed less like a diagnosis than like a disturbing enigma. “Only H.I.V./ AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton told the Times. Suicides among this group have also increased at an unprecedented rate. Two economists from Princeton, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, had found that the death rate of middle-aged white Americans, unlike that of their counterparts of other ethnicities and in other well-off countries, was going up, for reasons that have something to do with substance abuse, particularly with alcohol and opioids. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans,” the Times put it. The first time I saw “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s funny and frightening drama, which played Off Broadway last fall, was the same week that news broke of an alarming new study.
With its unsparing view of family life, Stephen Karam’s “The Humans,” now on Broadway, lays bare disturbing new realities about mortality in America.
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