When The Humans are the monsters

Hank West in The Humans. Photo by Sydney Schertz.

Critical acclaim is not the primary driver for how we select shows for our season. Many terrific plays and musicals received so-so reviews in their Broadway or regional debuts, often for reasons that are no fault of the text itself. Sometimes critics can just be grumpy!

Nonetheless, to the extent reviews matter, few of our plays received raves as profound and sweeping as Stephen Karam’s The Humans when it first reached stages a decade ago. Regarding the Broadway production, Newsday summed it up well: “There is so much love, dread, tenderness and brutality in The Humans that it is hard to believe just 90 minutes pass through Stephen Karam's deeply-felt family tragicomedy thriller.”

So, as you’re planning to attend the show in the next few weeks, or as you weigh if it’s worth your time, know this: it’s a goooood script.

In the spirit of educating audiences in advance, we also want you to be aware of how The Humans might challenge you. As with Fun Home earlier this year, this show chronicles the wonder of American family life with equal measures of pain.

Set over a family Thanksgiving in a pre-war NYC apartment, the play contains: adult language; the tense and complicated love between parents and children; the shame and distress of parents who couldn’t leave their children with more; the simmering rage of millennial children who were promised a more predictable ladder of success; and, perhaps most importantly, a frank and upsetting depiction of one character with dementia.

There is unspeakable beauty in the play, too, and abundant humor. Those familiar with the show will also know it’s  set in a janky two-story apartment, the kind that would appear on Zillow at a rental price far in excess of appearances. The two stories would not work in Armour Street, so you will enjoy the innovative theatricality that Glynnis, designer Evan Kinsley, and team have brought to the concept to adapt it to the realities of our space.

The cast is absolutely sensational. Some of the faces here have been in Charlotte and DCP shows for years and years, and they bring the Blake family to utterly recognizable life.

Now that you know, we hope that you’ll go!