THE HUMANS Previews- Page 3

[Kad]

Posted: 1/31/16 at 4:31pm

Braniff Forever said: "I just can't seem to like this play because Stephen Karam turned down my FB friend request! We have lots of mutual friends, but for some reason he said no dice. So after that, I've never liked him. "

 

Do you know him...?

Updated On: 1/31/16 at 04:31 PM

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 1/31/16 at 4:43pm

Braniff Forever said: "I just can't seem to like this play because Stephen Karam turned down my FB friend request! We have lots of mutual friends, but for some reason he said no dice. So after that, I've never liked him. "

I'm glad you felt the need to share that. 

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 1/31/16 at 4:52pm

If not for dysfunctional families, Broadway would have quite a gap re shows opening. They are extremely good fodder for shows these days.

[JBroadway]

Posted: 1/31/16 at 5:03pm

Braniff Forever said: "I just can't seem to like this play because Stephen Karam turned down my FB friend request! We have lots of mutual friends, but for some reason he said no dice. So after that, I've never liked him. "

 

I have to assume that post is a joke, if only for the sake of my faith in humanity. 

[newintown]

Posted: 2/1/16 at 8:08am

I enjoyed the play very much; yes, on the surface, it feels like a standard dysfunctional-family-everyone-has-a-secret play. But I found it interesting that all the secrets, although seemingly banal to the audience, are very important to these unhappy people. And I really liked the strange added layer of horror throughout. It diverted and entertained me for 95 minutes. And I'll probably have difficult remembering details about it in a year or so.

[bandit964]

Posted: 2/7/16 at 8:19am

Stephen Karam was at the other end of the bar at Joe Allen's the night after I saw The Humans.  I so badly wanted to go up to him and say,

 

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"what the f*ck happened at the end of your play?"

I think if I had 2 more drinks I would have.

[kdogg36]

Posted: 9/30/16 at 2:09pm

I know I'm dredging up an old thread again, but I didn't get to see The Humans until last Sunday, and I wanted to share some thoughts on this excellent play. 

First, I find AfterEight's comments rather odd here. His complaints about the bathroom odor discussion are far more extensive and intrusive than what can be found in Karam's dialogue; those lines take up maybe ten seconds of the play. It's not the kind of humor I like all that much, but I found it completely innocuous.

Anyhow, from another thread there seems to be some disagreement about whether there truly is anything supernatural in the play; I feel that there definitely is.

 

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The clincher is that the lights go off in the apartment, and Erik can't get them to come back on despite fiddling with all the circuit breakers, yet the hallway outside the apartment is revealed to be brightly lit when he opens the door.

That whole business with the lights and the circuit breakers reminded me of certain dreams I've had where the lights are off and I can't get them back on because the light switches don't work properly. I do think that Erik has fallen into some sort of insomnia-induced nightmare at this point in the play. So maybe it's not supernatural per se, but there's been a dramatic change in perspective.

This is probably obvious, but his entry into the brightly-lit hallway echoes his dream, discussed earlier in the play, where a faceless woman beckons him into a tunnel. He found it scary in the dream, but his daughter's partner tells him it's a sign of positive transformation and that he should go into the tunnel. That's exactly what he's doing in the final scene.

The woman he sees is not the faceless woman from his dream, but an old Chinese woman. Note that the weird noises throughout the play have been attributed to an old Chinese woman, but that his wife teases that they're really being caused by the faceless woman of his nightmare. The two, in some sense, have therefore been equated during the course of the play.

In general, I think the noises and the lights going out should have scared the wits out of everyone, but they find reasons to pretend that it's nothing out of the ordinary. I've had noisy neighbors, but nothing like that. These are signs of danger and doom, on a supernatural level, but the family chooses to go through the day in denial. And most of the characters can be said to be in denial about things in their non-supernatural lives.

Updated On: 9/30/16 at 02:09 PM