| re: "The Humans" hitting the regions (spoilers) | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 09:46 am EST 12/04/17 | |
| In reply to: re: "The Humans" hitting the regions (spoilers) - Delvino 06:13 am EST 12/04/17 | |
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| "Surely that post was a stab at humor." Actually, no, I'm quite serious about this. The family in "The Humans" comes from the area in the middle of Pennsylvania that swung for Trump last year, and the information that we have suggests that a large part of that swing came from disaffected whites who no longer felt served by an America that had promised them continual upward mobility and then failed to deliver it. The people in "The Humans" have been let down by their economic realities, as well as the gulf between their expectations and their achievements. Aside from the sister with the medical problem, none of them have problems of any real merit, despite the overwhelming tragedy that they see themselves as living in (again, aside from the lawyer, who is quite stoic about a condition that is serious and only likely to get more serious as access to quality health care continues to degrade). Karam empathetically captures the sadness, despair, and self-destruction of predominantly white middle-class people finding themselves on the decline of a society that has no place for their mistakes or mediocrity. In the process, he taps into a pain that is larger than the one family we see - it's felt by people across the country - but we're still left to grapple with the specific people we see on stage. There's nothing to tell us that Eric as a singular human being may nwind up voting for Trump, but the men and women that Eric represents certainly did. In retrospect, the story of this lost band of mostly white people divided between their expensive coastal cities and their faded industrial towns, quite literally surrounded by scary but unseen foreigners and unable to get through a dinner together, becomes a prescient portrait of the state of the traditional ruling power in our nation. It was a great warning cry of how close to the edge we were as a country, and how impossible we would find it to recognize the problem, much less talk about it. I've been a bit surprised that more people haven't reconsidered "The Humans" in the wake of 2016. It's made the play much more interesting to me than it seemed on first encounter. |
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