As a person who has only watched one play, and that being a high school play, I was not very enthusiastic in going on this Macaulay trip. The journey itself was very inconvenient because of the rain, and I though the only solace that I had was this was an excuse to visit Times Square again for the millionth time.
My perception of the play changed as soon as I walked into the theatre and saw that an actual set was there and I was assured that this wasn’t another opera. The play began and I was quickly interested because of the body language of the different actors. The father was pacing, the mom and the grandmother came out of the bathroom in a rush, and the daughters busted through the door really happy. The different dialogues between each family member, showed me their relationship with each other and that there are some disagreements.
What got me even more interested is how real the play felt, it almost felt like my own Thanksgiving back in Long Island but of course without all that drama. What I loved about this play is about how real and close to home it was. The director didn’t sugar coat and try to portray the family as the perfect family with no flaws, and didn’t have a predictable ending. I applaud the director for his rawness, and actually including the problems people who live in New York face.
There were so many twists and turns throughout the play that kept me engaged, and not once did I have the urge to take my phone out. What really caught my eye is the actors’ facial expressions, I believe that gave a lot more perspective about the situation at that point in the play. What I keep going back to is how real the setting of the play was, and how the talk about the struggles of New York, problems with relationships and starting a new life in a new setting.
Usually I can tell when a movie or play is really good when one of the characters bother me, and this was proven true during “Humans.” The character who really irked me was Brigid, the way she talked over another person, and just wasn’t simply understanding of another person’s situation did make me dislike her, but I did feel sympathy for her when I learned about her own struggles of having to collect unemployment etc. The fact that I was bothered really showed how good of a play it was, because it was able to evoke emotion in me and make me get interested into the play to see what happens with each character.
In conclusion, this was by far the best Macaulay trip I have ever gone on and I really hope most of my trips are like this in the future. It evokes so much emotion that I felt a connection with each and every character in the play and their different situations they were going through.
I also found the brief introduction of the performance to be of vast importance to my realized enjoyment of the work. Angela Hewitt and her cognizant synopsis of various fugues and cannons alleviated certain airs of confusion which surround the musical ensemble.; Bach’s compositions are eminently complex and difficult to imbibe without preexistent knowledge. We were given insight into the intricacies of each individual piece and provided with a fundamental basis to ground our impressions of the work on. Without prior knowledge of the individual pieces, we may have been daunted by their underlying complexities. The individual pieces sound incredibly similar to one another, and those who are unfamiliar with the background of each piece may have mistaken the performance as the prolonged playing of one particular fugue. I believe that this introduction was given to place the individual audience members, who compose a large spectrum of differing musical background and knowledge, on even footing.