(L-R: Daniel Davis, Kate Jennings Grant, Jeremy Shamos, David Furr, and Andrea Martin in The Humans.)
There’s deep authenticity and an almost tactile sadness in Stephen Karam’s play, The Humans, which has transferred to a Broadway production at the Helen Hayes after a hugely successful Off-Broadway run. If it doesn’t add up to much, in the end, or if the larger point in lost somewhere in the unfolding of the various calamities that befall the pious Blake family, of Scranton extraction, it doesn’t take away from the fact that rarely has a family dynamic been portrayed so accurately, or so wrenchingly, on the stage.
Brigid Blake (Sarah Steele) and her boyfriend, Richard (Arian Moayed) have invited the whole Blake clan to their cavernous, ground-floor Chinatown duplex, distressingly empty of furniture or decoration, for Thanksgiving. (The set design is by David Zinn, who did Fun Home, another disturbing reminder of how little we know about our own families.) Naturally, personal demons haunt the proceedings. Brigid’s career is floundering, her sister, Aimee (Cassie Beck) is ill and alone, her grandmother, Momo (Lauren Klein) is in the grips of dementia, and her parents, Erik (Reed Birney, great) and Deirdre (Jane Houdyshell, fantastic) are hiding something big. Or at least it seems that way, given Birney and Houdyshell’s performances, which elevate Karam's excellent, funny, spilling-over dialogue to such heights that the issues of their squabbling brood seem like minor complaints by comparison.
The play is excellently directed, by Joe Mantello (Wicked), who reminds us here of his marvelous facility for managing an ensemble. A late scene, in which the stage lights go completely dark, leaving Erik groping in the gloom, is brave if only for its unusualness. (Kudos to designer Justin Townsend for his punishing, incandescent apartment lighting.) Beyond its authenticity, however, the production doesn't stay with you long, much as a contentious Thanksgiving, so earth-shaking in November, has gone tepid in the memory by February.
Take out the authenticity and crank up the memorableness and you have Noises Off, at the American Airlines, another ensemble piece that’s effortlessly funny and marvelously acted and directed (by Jeremy Herrin of last season’s Wolf Hall, Parts One and Two, weirdly). Todd Haimes, the Roundabout Theater Company's artistic director, has referred to Michael Frayn’s 1983 comedy as “the funniest play ever written.” On the page, I’m not sure if that’s true. What I can say, and say wholeheartedly, is that central to and pervading this flawlessly cast production is without exception the best physical comedy I have ever seen on a stage.
The structure of the play is what gives it its spark. Effectively, Noises Off is a backstage farce bent into the shape of a Möbius strip and forcibly injected with crack cocaine. In the first act, the troupe of players about to launch a tour of a bedroom farce go through a disastrous late night rehearsal. In the second, the set of that farce is turned around to reveal the backstage exploits of a calamitous performance of the play, several weeks later. (The extraordinary set is designed by Derek McLane.) In the third, it’s flipped again to show us a later, even worse performance, in which the set is slowly destroyed as the evening goes completely off the rails.
Listing the accomplishments of the actors who pull all of this off would fill innumerable columns. Suffice it to say that the second act, by far the best, is performed almost entirely in silence, as those cast members who remain backstage go berserk trying to help those floundering out under the lights. Just as futile would be to name favorites in the cast, as their collective performance achieves that rare compliment for a farce of moving like a well-oiled machine, but I'll give it a go. Andrea Martin, as the lead of the show and the show within the show, proves a game captain. Jeremy Shamos and David Furr, as befuddled actors, and Rob McClure, as an eternally harried stagehand, achieve things with their bodies I had not previously thought possible for those not composed of rubber. Megan Hilty plays a terrible actor so well that I can only confirm that she is a wonderful one. (To approximate fear, her bimbo actress clomps across the stage waving her arms above her head like a deranged Muppet, counting her steps as she goes.) And Tracee Chimo cements her place as Broadway's most valuable character actress, disappearing, chameleon-like, into her demure, nervous stage manager. She is not even a little disguised, but the star of Bad Jews and The Heidi Chronicles is unrecognizable. Anyone who can camouflage like that and still be funny deserves top billing sometime soon.
Noises Off doesn't add up to much, either, dramatically. Seemingly vital plot lines are introduced, then dropped, with abandon. But the play proves that when you lean into structure, as it does and The Humans fails to do, that doesn't really matter. The Humans was exciting to watch, but painful, too, which is maybe why I've already begun to forget it. If I had the second act of Noises Off on tape, even now, days later, I'd still be rewinding it to try to understand how this cast could possibly have achieved such heights. All humans need a laugh once in a while.
