THEATER

The Helen Hayes Theater
The Humans

Review: ‘The Humans,’ a Family Thanksgiving for a Fearful Middle Class

A middle-class family seems to be spiraling toward perilous entropy in “The Humans,” the blisteringly funny, bruisingly sad and altogether wonderful play by Stephen Karam that opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, in a superlative Roundabout Theater Company production.

Written with a fresh-feeling blend of documentarylike naturalism and theatrical daring, and directed with consummate skill by Joe Mantello, Mr. Karam’s comedy-drama depicts the way we live now with a precision and compassion unmatched by any play I’ve seen in recent years. By “we” I mean us non-one-percenters, most of whom are peering around anxiously at the uncertain future and the unsteady world, even as we fight through each day trying to keep optimism afloat in our hearts.

The play turns on a staple of American drama: the family gathering. This can lead to canned laughter or trumped-up histrionics, but the Blakes, who assemble in Manhattan for Thanksgiving dinner, are drawn with such specificity and insight that we are instantly aware that we are in safe hands. (Mr. Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet,” seen on the same stage, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

These could be people we all know, a family with strong bonds, small subterranean resentments and the kind of troubles tearing at the fabric of the American middle class — which is to say money problems. But Mr. Karam’s play, like Annie Baker’s recent “John,” also contains shivery hints of the uncanny, reminders that the world is a mysterious place, not necessarily built for the comfort of the humans who seem to rule it.

Dinner is hosted by the youngest Blake sibling, Brigid (Sarah Steele), and her boyfriend, Rich (Arian Moayed), at their new apartment in Chinatown. It’s a duplex, but one made from combining a dark basement apartment with the almost equally dark unit upstairs. In David Zinn’s terrifically detailed two-tiered set, a spiral staircase connects the floors, and the action moves between them almost constantly.

The rest of the family has come from Pennsylvania: Brigid’s parents, Erik (Reed Birney) and Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell), along with Erik’s mother, called Momo (Lauren Klein), all from Scranton; and Brigid’s older sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck), from Philadelphia, where she works as a lawyer.

As the family members greet one another and housewarming gifts are given, the anatomy of the clan comes through as if in a clear X-ray: Erik and Deirdre toil at the kind of unspectacular jobs that have supplied a solid middle-class living (or the kind that used to, anyway). He’s worked for nearly 30 years at a private school, mostly in maintenance; she’s been an office manager at the same firm for even longer.

They take care of Momo, who is in a wheelchair and has dementia, but they cannot afford to hire someone to help, even as she becomes ever more subject to wild fits of temper. (Ms. Klein is remarkable as Momo, who sleeps through much of the dinner but occasionally begins muttering darkly, or flares up into one of her fits.)

As he engages in getting-to-know-you chat, Erik remarks, “I’ll tell you, Rich, save your money now … I thought I’d be settled by my age, you know, but man, it never ends … mortgage, car payments, Internet, our dishwasher just gave out.” He then adds, in a line as bleak as it is funny, “Don’tcha think it should cost less to be alive?”Brigid and Aimee seem to embody the classic American ideal of each generation doing better than the previous one, but they are weathering their own storms. Aimee reveals that she’s going to be laid off from her job, for ostensible work-related reasons but in fact, she believes, because she had to take time off because of her ulcerative colitis. (She is also sad about a recent breakup with her longtime girlfriend.)

Brigid aspires to be a composer, but is mired in student debt; she makes her living tending bar. Rich comes from a slightly higher class. He’s studying to become a social worker but will come into a trust fund when he turns 40 — two years away — a bit of information that Erik greets with a mild sense of resentment, just barely hinted at in Mr. Birney’s typically sensitive, nuanced performance.

All the actors in “The Humans” are at their best. Ms. Houdyshell’s bubbly humor and warmth are, as always, immensely pleasurable; like Mr. Birney, she’s incapable of a dishonest word or action. Ms. Beck and Ms. Steele have a nice sisterly rapport, as the women share laughs over their mother’s strange barrage of texts and emails. (“You don’t have to text her every time a lesbian kills herself,” Brigid says, referring to a recent dispatch from Mom to Aimee.) Mr. Moayed has one of the smaller roles, but he provides Rich with an amiable gravity and intimations of emotional troubles he once faced.

 Mr. Mantello orchestrates the complicated action and shifting emotional currents with admirable dexterity; this may be his finest work in an already distinguished career. For while “The Humans” is on the surface a realistically drawn play about a family facing various crises, Mr. Karam employs this familiar formula to look more deeply at the ways we are all at the mercy of fate and circumstance.

Erik had accompanied Aimee on a job interview in Lower Manhattan on 9/11; he still recalls the terrifying two hours it took for them to find each other amid the chaos. He’s not too comfortable with Brigid’s moving into a basement apartment in a potential flood zone, either. His grandmother died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911, just blocks away.

And Brigid sums up one of Deirdre’s emails to her daughters, with a link to a science article, thus: “Happy Tuesday, oh and just F.Y.I.: At the subatomic level, everything is chaotic and unstable … Love, Mom.”

The fragility of human life and all it contains is a recurring theme, and it accelerates as the drama darkens — literally. In addition to strange, loud thuds from somewhere above (it sounds like the footsteps of an angry or indifferent god), the apartment grows dimmer as one light after another mysteriously blinks out.

By the end of Mr. Karam’s haunting, beautifully realized play — quite possibly the finest we will see all season — the apartment has emptied; there’s not a single human being left on a stage suddenly plunged into total darkness, as if a black hole had swallowed up the Blake family before the turkey has even had time to cool.