The Humans was a really dark and intimate look at an apparently minimalist situation. A family getting together for dinner is well within the norm for the majority, and so to watch the “norm” so catastrophically lit up and put on display felt natural and unsettling all in one moment.
The play was really interestingly written. As for any play, the dialogue is the premier mechanism used to tell the story. While this play definitely specially-featured the setting as symbolic, the dialogue is at the forefront of what we absorb. It is only after the play is over, walking uptown in cold rain with Candace because we wanted cupcakes, that I have time to reflect on what the thumping noise or the wandering woman or the lights going out meant. But during the play, I’m drawn to Brigid’s shrill insults and Deirdre’s tinges of Southern warmth. The tension of the dialogue ebbs and flows throughout the entirety of the play. One moment everyone is sitting around the table, exchanging gratitudes, only to have one person say too much and be sharply rebuked by Brigid, who is then softly admonished by Richard. Richard is clearly the odd one out. He’s incredibly articulate, speaks in mature slurs of polite locutions. Old and modern all in one. He’s still in school, he’s got that 401 K, but his life isn’t effortless and he shares with his new family that he spent a good deal of time battling depression. Each character offers the audience a glance into his or her life as they themselves deeply introspect. This is natural. We do it all the time. Socrates said himself “The unexamined life is not worth living.” But when we examine someone examining his own life, that is when I get uncomfortable.
The dialogue functioned as the explicit memorandum. But the setting made a thousand small statements that kind of made me knit my eyebrows together. They made me knit my eyebrows together because they all felt like they were examining really complex things, and they could be used to say this or that, and they were so complex that I wasn’t totally sure how to draw these things together and calculate the thesis of the entire play. And then I was like, well maybe that’s the point, is that some events aren’t interconnected and we look for the connectivity in places where it just doesn’t exist, and we pick some things apart and we destroy them in the process. The duplex could’ve easily been a metaphor for heaven and hell. The woman wandering could’ve been the playwright making a statement about the perpetual motion of life. The alcohol functioned as a cushion for the emotional torment the characters experience. The medicine Momo takes functioned the same, only it was a foreshadowing of what the cushion was to become. Momo saying Grace connected spirituality and lucidity. Erik’s dream was a mere reflection of our deepest insecurities. Usually our mistakes. Richard’s dream was just a comic relief from the building tension of the atmosphere. The lights going out one by one are reflective of time passing by. Momo’s lights go out one by one. The tension is ever growing. Until the door finally shuts.
Because this is a pretty esteemed play, I’m gonna say the every single piece of the setting had a function. But I also am not going to put it past the playwright to have made it this way to mess with everyone. At its essence, this is a regular family dinner thrown on stage, performed by actors. Maybe it’s statement is a descent into chaos. Or maybe it’s statement is to stop looking for statements. Maybe it’s statement is the complexity we rarely stop to observe in simplicity. To be honest, I’m still wondering about it. There was a lot for me to take from the play, and it really got me thinking. The title is an indication that it’s definitely examining human nature but because all of those statements are examinations of human nature I’m still exactly where I started. I’m trying to think of some big gaping conclusion so I can end this but I don’t really know which big gaping conclusion I drew from this play so I’m going to end it on that ambiguous note.
