The Humans (Revised TCG Edition). Stephen Karam
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First Edition, October 2015
Revised Edition, April 2016
Contents
Foreword
Production History
Dramatis Personae
The Humans
By Samuel G. Freedman
Midway through Stephen Karam’s masterful play The Humans, several generations of the Blake family sit down to Thanksgiving dinner. They sip wine and chug beer as the table fills with platters of food, and they pass the final moments before the meal chatting about a popular zombie show on TV. “Yeah, well,” the mother and matriarch, Deirdre, cuts in to say, “there’s enough going on in the real world to give me the creeps, I don’t need any more.”
That passing comment, uttered within a few seconds, could serve as an epigraph for the entire play. For what Karam began writing as a kind of homage to stage thrillers like Wait Until Dark evolved over time into the sort of ghost story in which the phantoms are all too real. The darkness that frightens and finally envelops his characters comes literally from an event as prosaic as light bulbs burning out. Those faltering lights, in turn, stand for the social forces that leave the Blakes clinging ever more precariously to the middle-class life that is supposed to be an American birthright.
One definition of great art might be that it knows the news before the news has even happened. Indeed, as it opened Off-Broadway in late 2015 and transferred onto Broadway early the following year, The Humans indelibly captured a mood of national anxiety about income inequality and economic stagnation that animated the divisive and polarizing presidential campaign in 2016. Yet, as much as The Humans distills a contemporary moment, it is a work informed by decades of history, history as lived by Karam and his forebears.
Karam was born in 1979 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, once the commercial hub of a coal-mining region. On his paternal side, Karam descends from Lebanese immigrants, specifically a grandfather who raised ten children on a tailor’s wages. The maternal line is Irish Catholic, with a grandfather who was a newspaper typesetter besotted with the words he assembled in lead. In a Scranton that was still thriving, each family achieved its upward mobility. Stephen’s father, Albert, became a high-school principal, and his mother, Marie (nee McAndrew), ran the language lab at a local college.
Growing up in a post-industrial age, young Stephen found nothing unusual about the gob piles, the mounds of blackened coal waste, that his family passed on the drive to visit his maternal grandmother. He took it for granted that the Lackawanna terminal, with its limestone facing and bronze clock, was a perpetual redevelopment project that had not welcomed an actual train since 1970. For that matter, all the abandoned and overgrown tracks and trestles around town seemed merely like great places for bike rides. Moving through high school, discovering a love for theater, Stephen lived almost oblivious to the story unfolding outside his front door, the story he was destined to tell.
Then he went to college at Brown University, a place so foreign to him he had never before heard the term WASP. “When you start to separate, you have this emotional connection to the place you grew up,” he explained to me. “It’s visceral, connected to the sights and sounds. Then you move away and you see your hometown the way the world does. I felt a protectiveness and a sadness about people seeing Scranton as a place that is wilting. Then Scranton becomes the stand-in for Slough in the American version of The Office, and you realize your hometown is the butt of jokes. I’ve taken friends back home and you feel it’s a place that’s depressed—the industry has left the building—but it’s also home. So there’s a comfort to it.”
In that friction between the Scranton of sentimental memory and the Scranton of hardscrabble reality, Karam had found his subject and his subject had found him. He may have notionally set his first two professional plays in other places—Salem, Oregon, for Speech & Debate, and Nazareth, Pennsylvania, for Sons of the Prophet—but the psychic and topical terrain was plainly inspired by Karam’s experience of Scranton. Speech & Debate (2006) portrayed three high-school students as they sought to expose a pedophiliac teacher; Sons of the Prophet (2011) focused on the gay son of a Lebanese-American Maronite Christian family, a scenario very much like the playwright’s own. These works, with their darkly edged comedy, put Karam on the literary map. Speech & Debate became one of the most widely produced new plays of its decade on the regional-theater circuit, while Sons of the Prophet was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.
Like its predecessors, The Humans does not take place in Scranton. The narrative action, conveyed in ninety unbroken minutes of real time, occurs in the shabby apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown where Brigid Blake, the youngest child of her family, has just moved in with her boyfriend, Richard Saad. The couple is hosting Thanksgiving dinner for the rest of Brigid’s family: her parents Erik and Deirdre, her older sister Aimee, her grandmother Momo.
With this ensemble, Karam takes on the challenge to which every major American playwright must rise, composing a family drama that speaks far beyond domestic concerns alone. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night stands as the common ancestor and impossibly lofty standard for all the plays and playwrights to follow, from Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie) to Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman) to Sam Shepard (A Lie of the Mind, Buried Child) to Marsha Norman (’night, Mother) to Wendy Wasserstein (The Sisters Rosensweig) to August Wilson (Fences, The Piano Lesson).
At one level, Karam mines the relational conflicts of family life with both copious compassion and astringent wit. Aimee is heartbroken after a breakup with her lesbian lover and also afflicted with ulcerative colitis. Momo is deep into dementia, prone to explosions of angry gibberish. Deirdre and Erik, each in their way, plead with Brigid to marry Richard and, while she’s at it, return to her lapsed Catholic faith. Karam’s unerring ear for the Blake banter, the dueling jibes about everything from cockroaches to kale, has an audience laughing at nearly every line.
The kitchen-sink setting and abundant punchlines, though, serve to set a trap. For the deeper subject that Karam means to plumb concerns the Blakes not only as amusingly fallible individuals but as people being acted upon by larger societal forces. “I never set out to write an ‘issue’ play,” Karam told me, referring to a label some critics have hung on The Humans, intending it as a compliment. “I wrote the play because I wanted to air out what was in my mind. The reason you create is because there’s a story crawling to get out of you. The same thing that’s keeping you up at night, you hope others will care about.”
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Karam started writing The Humans in 2012, soon after the Occupy Wall Street movement forced the discussion of income inequality onto the front page. He kept writing, even as it appeared that Occupy had stricken its tent cities and vanished without an impact. And he kept writing before Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump launched presidential campaigns that, in almost irreconcilable ways, gave vent to populist resentment and rage.
The Blakes do not rage. Yet in the spikiest bits of Karam’s dialogue they give voice to people who are teetering on the edge of the elevator shaft. An exchange like this one makes Karam’s audience gasp with both humor and somber recognition.
BRIGID
I’m spending most of my nights bartending—you guys don’t even know how much student debt I’m stuck with—
ERIK
Yeah, well, I do know who refused to go to a state school.
As we learn, Erik has been stuck as a high-school maintenance man for twenty-eight years. Deirdre, an office manager, laments, “I’m working for two more guys in their twenties, and just ’cause they have a special degree they’re making five times what I make, over forty years I’ve been there.” With the family affluence that supports his graduate-school