The family in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Humans (from left) Andy Prosky, Anne-Marie Cusson, Lindsey Corey, Casey Sacco, Daniel Kublick. (Photo by Curtis Brown Photography)
By Bill Hirschman
There are many dramas, often among the finest, whose overall themes and deeper meaning only reveal themselves in repeated viewings, and we are lucky that they are produced multiple times.
This third time seeing Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning The Humans again becomes clearer with Palm Beach Dramaworks’ fine depiction of a normal family deteriorating over Thanksgiving dinner from a close bonded unit into a shattered dissolving group barely—but still – holding together.
Indeed, now it seems clearer thanks to director J. Barry Lewis and a superb cast that this humorous and emotion-ravaging work is rooted in the Blake family being inescapably recognizable as families we know or are even our own. The humanity in The Humans seems to be its vulnerability.
The action occurs at a Thanksgiving gathering of three lower middle-class generations in the dilapidated downtown Chinatown apartment still being moved into by the antsy animated daughter Brigid (Casey Sacco). She is working two bartending jobs to make a dent in student loans and who has been forced to delay her dreams of being a composer. Alongside making dinner is her significant other, the affable Richard Saad, (Daniel Kublick) a trust fund baby closing in on a M.S.W. degree in his late 30s and due for a inheritance when he turns 40.
The parents who fret about the apartment’s condition are Erik (Andy Prosky), a private school employee now reduced to being a janitor who is supposedly looking to retire to a lakeside house. His wife Deirdre (Anne-Marie Cusson) is a veteran office manager whose soulless yuppie bosses are less experienced than she. The salt-of-the-earth couple who cling to a strong religious faith have driven in from their home in Scranton with senile mother “Momo” (Laurie Tanner) in tow in her wheelchair. Rounding out the group is older daughter Aimee (Lindsey Corey), whose severe colitis has cost her a partnership at a law firm and who is breaking up with her girlfriend because of the illness.
They all believably share a wicked sense of humor, a wry pleasure in knowing just how to ping each other’s egos and rationalizations, and yet savor a true sense of belonging.
Under the genuine bonhomie, warmth and wry frictions built over the decades, almost everyone is nursing secrets that will tumble out to test the family’s solidarity – including one devastating revelation that explodes in the last 15 minutes, completing the implosion. Additionally, the atmosphere is ever so slowly being enveloped by a sense of emptiness and erosion.
It’s like seeing a Kmart photo department family portrait that has been left too near a wall heater. Almost imperceptibly, the edges start to brown, the image shudders a bit, then the edges curl ever so slightly. You can’t help notice the matte finish is smoking. And suddenly, the perfect image erupts in flames.
Something just out of sensory perception alerts the audience that all is not in balance. As the evening continues, backstories, long-nurtured sore points and a few secrets stoke submerged anxieties until the aforementioned conflagration.
Karam’s achievement is the intentionally unfocused but the growing unease that mirrors the family’s sense (and most of the audience’s) that they have lost any control over their lives and are vulnerable to the slight shifts in the winds of chance and fate. They are underpaid, overworked, underappreciated people who get finessed out of life. The playwright, director and cast have created people you pass on the street every day – or see in the mirror.
The Humans is like an anthropologist of the future’s look back at a species’ efforts in the early part of the 21st Century to cope with the fraying of a dream.
The growing angst in the ramshackle apartment that seems like a haunted house is underscored by sounds and events such as lighting that goes out fixture by fixture and an accompanying increase in the strange sounds peculiar to a city ranging from the traffic outside to ominous creaks and groans from this pre-war building.
This edition’s triumph lies partly in the chemistry of the cast who are technically an ensemble, but whose characters are intentionally so different from each other that you wonder if they are from different clans. And yet these characters know where each other has been, knows each other’s festering recriminations and yet remain in each other’s corner even while sniping at old differences. The cast imbues them, seemingly effortlessly, with a sense of comfortably slipping into familiar family tropes such as group singing of an Irish classic.
Karam earns his praise for accurately creating familial bantering, teasing and rituals chock with of decades-old references, catchphrases, hoary jokes and shorthand built from a shared lifetime around a cockpit of a dining room table.
The cast who looks so different fuse into a family unit. Corey is wonderfully vulnerable as the emotionally walking wounded. Sacco in one of her best local performances is the normally affable intelligent woman whose professional life is not what she expected but who is grateful for the partner (not in any hurry to get married). Kubrick is convincing as the relatively sanest person present trying to diplomatically keep the evening on an even keel even though he is the outsider ethnically and financially. Tanner is convincing as an unnerving representation of what may await us all. Cusson creates a mother trying to reconcile her religious devotions with her family’s assorted foibles completely at odds with those beliefs.
But last but not least, Prosky perfectly melds Erik’s bouncing back and forth between secret sadness, fatherly pride, and reaching out for the traditionally promised illusion of “family.”
You believe the parents share decades of joys and slights. The characters Erik and Dierdre have come to a complete understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. But their deep dark secret slips out by millimeters – unmistakable but still understated. Both actors subtly put across Karam’s underlying concern: the slow sad realization that that their lifelong efforts to achieve economic and emotional security for themselves and their children is seeming less and less likely.
Lewis once again proves himself one of the finest directors of difficult material, helping mine multiple layers of meaning, initially unspecified angst and that complicated intersecting pasts that haunts the room. The slow dissolution is marked by overlapping dialogue and pregnant silent pauses for introspection.
He and the cast are crucial in that Karam’s almost non-existent plot moves quite slowly, mostly marked by ordinary events and banal discussions. But they create credible almost invisible tonal shifts from comic to tragic to unsettling spookiness.
Anne Mundell’s set designs have ranged from the gorgeous pristine Arcadia to the cluttered The Dresser. Here she has recreated a doppelganger of the original Broadway design with its apartment connected by a spiral staircase over a basement kitchen and dining area. Once a respectable home, it now has flaking woodwork and peeling puke green paint. We don’t normally cite these folks, but the detailed overwhelming environment was built by Doug Wilkinson and Kira Barnes.
The evolving atmosphere was skillfully highlighted by Kirk Bookman’s lighting, such as some scenes performed upstairs in barely any light as characters surreptitiously eavesdrop on the banter downstairs. The creaking, groaning mysteriously threatening-sounding noises from above are haunting creations of sound designer Roger Arnold.
The Humans is about a family around a dining room table, flawed and fallible trying to remain a family.
Note: Karam’s earlier Sons of the Prophet and Speech & Debate were produced and directed by Joseph Adler at GableStage.
The Humans plays through March 2 at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Plays 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. 2 p.m. Wednesday, Thursda,y Saturday, Sunday. Running time: One hour 43 minutes; no intermission. Tickets $92. Info: (561) 514-4042; palmbeachdramaworks.org
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