Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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by Stephen Karam, directed by Jackie Maxwell
Canadian Stage & Citadel Theatre (Edmonton), Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto
February 9-25, 2018
Erik: “The gift of poverty is not a myth. It is a blessing”
Stephen Karam’s play The Humans may have won the Tony Award for Best New Play in 2016, but there are so few plays on Broadway nowadays that such a win is no guarantee of excellence. Family gathers for an occasion – long-held secrets come out. This has become such an overused plot strategy in American drama that it takes extraordinary writing linked to an extraordinary vision to make it seem new. One such case is Tracey Letts’s August: Osage County of 2007. Karam’s play has slightly better than ordinary writing and an only slightly interest concept. Yet, even the acting of a superlative cast can’t make The Humans feel different enough from any number of “family dinner gone wrong” plays.
In The Humans, the Blake family has gathered for Thanksgiving dinner in the new apartment of Brigid (Sara Farb) and her boyfriend Richard (Richard Lam) in Chinatown in Manhattan. Brigid and Richard have barely moved in and not everything has been unpacked. Brigid’s parents Deirdre (Laurie Paton) and Erik (Ric Reid) have brought Erik’s wheelchair-bound mother Fiona, known as “Momo” with them from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Brigid’s older sister Aimee (Alana Hawley Purvis), a lawyer in New York City has joined them.
As per the typical “family dinner gone wrong” play, there is an implicit tension between the family members attempting to maintain an outward show of happiness and celebration and the inevitability that conversation will bring forth the secrets about their lives that the participants are trying to conceal.
Deirdre and Erik, though staunchly Roman Catholic, are somehow fine that Aimee is a lesbian and sad that she and her partner have broken up and that Aimee has some sort of chronic disease. They don’t know just how acrimonious the break-up was and that Aimee still loves her partner who now definitely does not love her. They also don’t know know how serious Aimee’s disease, ulcerative colitis, is or that it will require an operation with optimal results that are far from pleasant.
Brigid, who wants to be a composer, is pretending that she is taking waitstaff jobs to tide her and Richard over until she can continue her studies. What her parents don’t know is that her plans of any sort of career in music have been sabotaged by a recommendation letter from the professor she thought appreciated her the most.
As quite a different sort of secret, Deirdre and Erik assume that Richard is from the lower-middle class just like they are. That both Erik and Richard are plagued by weird dreams seems to confirm that. What they don’t know is that Richard comes from money that doesn’t have to worry about scraping dimes together as Brigid’s parents do.
There is no secret about Momo who is suffering from Alzheimer’s and is having one of her “bad days” when she mutters incomprehensibly and shouts out fearful questions about where she is or where she is going. Her “secret” comes in the form of a letter Momo wrote before the disease took hold and that movingly shows what a caring, life-loving person this now wretched, constantly cared-for person once was.
Six characters equals six revelations and Karam, who has spaced out the others evenly over the play’s 105 minutes, saves the parents’ secrets for last. What is so disappointing, however, is that unlike the hints that lead up to the revelations of the other four, Karam gives us no hints whatsoever, except for Erik’s generally negative world-view, of what Erik’s bombshell of a secret is. Given Erik’s character, at least the way that Ric Reid has played it, the revelation does not even seem credible.
More effective is Karam’s use of sound, masterfully imagined by Matthew Skopyk, to create an eerie atmosphere. Brigid and Richard are proud to have found an apartment in Manhattan with so much space, but it is on the ground floor with bars on the two small windows and a spiral staircase to the finished basement below. At irregular intervals loud thuds are heard on the ceiling of the first floor rooms as if someone were dropping a bowling ball on the floor above. The couple say they can’t speak to the tenant because she’s Chinese. At others times the trash compactor in the basement goes to work with a deafening wheeze. The laundry room generates its own noises. Karam shows that the young couple may have their own space but that they are constantly under sonic attack in ways they can’t control. As if that were not enough, once Karam has established that Brigid and Richard are at the mercy of random sound, he then adds in the random reliability of the lights, that can flicker or even go out without any apparent reason.
Besides generating humour about life in a lousy apartment, Karam uses these effects symbolically to demonstrate that the characters are living in a world over which they have no control as are the situations of Aimee, Brigid, Richard and Momo. This still makes Erik’s secret incident, that he could have controlled, all the more inconsistent with the others. On the other hand, Deirdre’s religious-based cheerful stoicism that makes her the most centred and unflappable character in the play.
As if the light and sound effects were not enough, Karam decides that Aimee and Erik were present in Lower Manhattan on 9/11. This historical detail certainly does not mesh with the others and oddly suggests symbolically that terrorism has succeeded in making the world chaotic which may represent the terrorists’ intentions but not, so far, their achievement.
The over-familiarity of the “family dinner gone wrong” would be more enjoyable if Karam had been able to come up with more appealing characters or given them something unusual to say. He doesn’t. In fact, his recreation of an ordinary family celebrating Thanksgiving is so realistic that it’s not all that interesting. If Karam has some larger meaning in mind he has let it get lost in discussions of who is eating or drinking what and who is serving whom.
The production has an excellent cast which makes it more the pity that the script is so weak. We can tell from the moment Ric Reid as Erik enters the apartment that something is preying on his mind and he periodically needs to leave the table as if contemplating revealing his secret is making him nervous. Reid shows through Erik’s often unnecessarily harsh tone and oddly negative statements that he is deeply troubled by something. Strangely enough, however, knowing the structure of this kind of play, we know we will find out eventually what’s worrying him and are therefore not particularly intrigued to find out. Reid does absolutely all that he can to make a nuanced portrait of a man being consumed by guilt and dread from within, but Karam gives him very little help.
Laurie Paton’s Deirdre, in contrast, is full of life and humour. Paton gives us a woman unashamedly devoted to conventionalism, Catholicism and motherhood who sends “care packages” to Aimee and Brigid and forwards them generic news articles on topics she thinks will interest them. She can laugh at herself as well as needle others and, as we realize at the end, has not had her religious belief or her belief in other people so shaken that they have weakened. Paton gives a wonderfully warm performance of the only fully rounded character in the play.
Alana Hawley Purvis can’t quite seem to pull the few contrasting life experiences together that Karam has given to create a character. Yes, Aimee is a lawyer not doing well at her company, yes she has an unusual disease, yes she is a lesbian still missing her former relationship – but this never seems to add up to anything except a collection of situations. Purvis makes Aimee seem to be a good person to whom bad things have happened, but it’s hard to say more than that. Purvis’s best scene comes when Aimee phones her ex-girlfriend with the holiday as an excuse. Hearing only one side of her conversation shows Aimee struggling to cope with her ex’s harsher than expected response while Aimee still tries any tactic she can to keep her ex on the phone.
If Karam gives Purvis little to work with as Aimee, he gives Sara Farb and Richard Lee even less as Brigid and Richard. Again both Farb and Lee make their characters pleasant, but Karam has neglected to give them any important distinguishing features.
Karam’s use of the character Momo seems almost entirely symbolic. Karam’s sound and light effects show the world outside is out of control while Momo’s presence shows the world inside the mind can go out of control too. Beyond that, however, there is little need for the character and the use of Alzheimer’s as a symbol is both clichéd and insulting. Maralyn Ryan does what she can with a thankless role.
Further weakening our ability to engage with the characters is Karam’s insistence on a two-storey set, part of the apartment-as-cave metaphor he only partially pursues. Karam’s preface to the play invites the audience’s mind to wander where it likes when viewing the play. Luckily, Jackie Maxwell using Michael Walton’s precise lighting shifts our focus from incident to incident as they happen on the set. Yet, there is no doubt that this intimate family drama would have more impact if Karam ditched the notion of such a large set and allowed for a more intimate production.
The best that Maxwell achieves with The Humans is to make the family on stage feel like a real family. This is one of Maxwell’s fortes as she has shown in family dramas at the Shaw Festival like Uncle Vanya in 2016, The Magic Fire in 2006 or Rutherford and Son in 2004. She achieves this by educating us as to how everyone will likely react to any new bit of information and thus creates links of relationship between characters that bind the group together. To see a diverse group of actors transformed into such a realistic family on stage is the most positive aspect of the production.
Karam has been lauded for revealing the plight of today’s middle class in a Broadway play. The problem here is that Karam ultimately does not reveal this plight to be very much different from the one that Arthur Miller exposed in Death of a Salesman in 1949. Although Karam’s Erik Blake does not have the optimism of Miller’s Willy Loman, the parallels in plot between the two, including Karam’s sci-fi/supernatural conclusion are rather too strong as are the parallels between Deirdre Blake and Linda Loman’s accommodation to their husbands’ stresses. Were Karam cleverer he might address the question of why so little has changed for the American middle class between 1949 and the present. But he doesn’t. By all means, see The Humans for its ensemble acting and especially the performances of Ric Reid and Laurie Paton, but, in terms of insight, Karam’s play is one that promises little and delivers less.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Richard Lee, Maralyn Ryan, Sara Farb, Laurie Paton, Alana Hawley Purvis and Ric Reid; Laurie Paton, Richard Lee and Maralyn (upstairs) and Ric Reid, Sara Farb and Alana Hawley Purvis (downstairs; Ric Reid. ©2017 Epic Photography.
For tickets, visit https://www.canadianstage.com.
2018-02-12
The Humans