Perhaps the most critically acclaimed play of the current
Broadway season has been Stephen Karam’s The
Humans. While typical Broadway blockbusters tend to be lavish musical
spectacles such as Les Miserables or Wicked, or even adaptations of already
beloved properties such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock, Karam’s play is almost the direct antithesis of all
of these: a straight family drama played out in real time. The play is, as many
great works of drama are, simultaneous poignant and humorous, tackling such
expected themes as family love and the uncertainties of growing older. However,
one theme that pervades throughout nearly the whole ninety minutes of the
Humans’ run time is that of social class.
The Blakes,
a shining example of the quintessential Irish American working class family,
consist of the senior citizen aged Erik and Deirdre, and their two daughters
Aimee and Brigid, the latter of which they’ve traveled from their suburban
Scranton home to join for a gathering that doubles as an apartment warming as
well as Thanksgiving dinner. After the play introduces us to the characters and
sets up its familial themes and motifs, it is very easy to begin making
connections to the different works we’ve read in Class in American Culture.
One immediate parallel that I
drew from one of our class readings was the idea of the conditions around us determining
out fate, as we found in our modernist readings such as Richard Wright’s Native Son. While in the plight of
Bigger Thomas is a result of his being a black man in a white dominated
society, the condition being explored by the characters in Karam’s play is
class itself, with his characters distinctly embodying our contemporary ideas
of a typical middle class family. Immediately after the initial greetings and
exchanging of holiday salutations, it is clear that Erik and Deirdre, the
father and mother characters, are in less than ideal situations. Instead of
enjoying retirement, they are both continuing to work venial jobs bosses who
are younger than them, yet make more money all the same. Their daughter Aimee, the
only member of the family who appears at first glance to be the most
traditionally successful, reveals that she is being laid off from the law firm
she works at due to her having to take time off to seek treatment for a medical
condition. Finally, the youngest daughter, Brigid, finds herself in a rut from
which she can’t get out as a frustrated would-be composer, and instead has to
make do with tending bar for the time being.
The through line in all of
their stories is one that is made clear again and again as the play progresses:
In a post 9/11 America where the world no can longer delude itself into
believing in the American utopia of the baby boomer generation, it is often the
middle class who find themselves left behind and unable to forge their own way.
In the context of an election season where so much rhetoric has been dedicated
to exposing the disappearing and fractured state of the American middle class,
this play explores the factors that contribute to such a phenomenon. Despite
trying to do honest work and advance themselves so that each generation might
be able to become more successful then the next, these characters constantly
find themselves confronted with factors such as a hurting economy and the fears
and paranoia of terrorism that constantly hold them back and resign them to a perpetual
fate of trying to get ahead, but finding themselves stuck in the same place.
The studying of a course such as Class and American Culture is significant in
helping us understand this play because analyzing the different discussions of
class in certain historic and literary contexts is essential to engaging in the
different conversations about our modern society as presented through different
mediums, whether they be plays or otherwise.
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