The Humans, at Opel Theater

Or: Ashes, Ashes We All Fall Down

The holiday season, time for the family to get back together again. Time for roast beast and comments on the weather and who ruined whose life, and the cutting things that only come from loved ones. Tonight that family is the Blake’s Erik (Gordon Reinhart) and Deirdre (Kathryn Duggan) coming to take a Thanksgiving in New York City with their daughter Brigid (Amanda Baschangel) in her new nice-with-winking apartment (described with great particularity by playwright Stephen Karam to envision its mundane creepiness) and her boyfriend Richard (Chris Canfield). Along for the ride are sister Aimee (Samantha McAllister) and Momo (Julia Bennett), the grandmother long down the shadowed way. Karam has hatched a full-fledged family real as any that sits in the seats at the white dog theater, full of private foibles and ticks, faux pas and beautiful gestures, who split and wound each other with all the old favorites, health, wealth, faith, and failure.

Karam’s Bakerseque take on the big city family drama is both refreshingly and distressingly real, no knife fights, no grand excommunications, confessions flopping into the limelight like clutter from a closet. His sense of language as it falls out (much of director Daniel Vogt’s work can be seen suspending the simultaneous talk, and simultaneous silences, without the benefit of action, timing it so it takes its moment in the air without net or wire). We are able to take full advantage of this domestic symphony, this voyeuristic treasure, by a cast who have the grace to make an interruption a gift. Reinhart brings his well-honed prickliness to the fore as the ball-walking patriarch while Duggan cradles her despairs and embitterments with exquisite care. Canfield expresses a fine cello note of calmness as he tosses out joke after joke, and tickles us with Richard’s own oddities. Of particular note is Baschnagel’s quickness, a liquidity with the playwrights emotional sleight of hand and sliding into jokes (both by and about Brigid) with sterling unselfconsciousness. This is well balanced by McAllister’s verkelptness as Aimee stomaches her own problems and lets her indigestion of the spirit show, in choking back tears or a razor even voice. Together they delight us, playing and gossiping away from their cares, and balancing each other, Aimee trying to blunt her sister’s casual razor-cutting cruelties. Lots of Awws and Ooooh dear’s were to be heard from the audience.

Of course, this isn’t just a family drama, it’s a ghost story. Or a monster story. Erik feels haunted by an unknown presence, gathering in the shadows and in the flakes of ash fluttering down from the skyscrapers above. But the viewer feels that the supernatural might as well sit back and let this family choke: each one of the Blake’s feels like they’re already condemned: some thorn health, wealth, faith or failure, sticks in their minds drains their strength. Like Momo cursing the darkness (Bennet the wrenching mask and voice of the 7th age) nothing good is in store for them, they’ve run out of happy endings. Like the startling booms coming from the apartment above, their fate is knocking, louder and louder.