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Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York Times (left), Damon Winter/The New York Times (right)
(THE NEW YORK TIMES) One by one, they make their confused, anxious, sometimes mysterious departures. Husband and wife, their two daughters and one daughter’s boyfriend, a grandmother suffering from dementia, rolled off in her wheelchair, until the stage before us is a darkened void.
It’s hard to watch the eerie disappearing act that takes place in the final moments of Stephen Karam’s play “The Humans,” as a middle-class Pennsylvania family leaves one daughter’s Manhattan apartment, without having the unsettling feeling that you are watching, in microcosm, what’s taking place on a large scale across America. The current presidential election, the most fractious and even frightening in recent memory, has become a referendum of sorts on the shrinking — or is it the disappearance? — of the American middle class.
His terrific play, happily now on Broadway, is one of several I’ve seen recently that homes in on the very subjects roiling the political sphere. Financial anxiety and the sense of an uncertain future have unleashed a populist fury on both sides of the political divide. But these plays allow us to look beyond the posturing, punditry and angry speechifying, to really feel the painful, inescapable hardships of daily life as it is lived by increasing numbers of Americans.
One might fancifully imagine that the two members of the younger generation depicted in “The Humans” — sisters played by Sarah Steele and Cassie Beck — would be feeling the Bern. Ms. Steele’s Brigid is working two bartending jobs to pay off piles of student debt. Her older sister’s career as a lawyer is in jeopardy because ulcerative colitis has cut into her billing hours, and she suspects she’s soon to be cut loose from the firm — meaning, bye-bye, plush health insurance. Bernie Sanders’s call for a single-payer system would be awfully hard for such a character to resist.
Their father, played by Reed Birney, in middle age finds himself with no retirement nest egg, an uncertain work future and bills that keep mounting: “Dontcha think it should cost less to be alive?” he cracks.
He, or a man like him at least, might find himself heeding the siren call of Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigrant demagogy, against his better instincts. And I’d bet that his more pragmatic, empathetic and deeply devout wife, played by Jayne Houdyshell — who has been working for four decades as an office manager, with few raises — would quietly cast her vote for Hillary Clinton.
This is all, of course, fantasy, but it illustrates the immediacy with which Mr. Karam’s play addresses the current cultural malaise. And yet “The Humans” goes beyond closely observed realism, using unsettling imagery to underscore the idea that the forces bearing down upon everyday Americans are not just a matter of a daily struggle to make ends meet. At the mercy of circumstances beyond their control, people on the economic edge may feel as if they are engaged in a terrifying fight for their lives.
In writing her play “Sweat,”which I saw last summerat the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Lynn Nottage and her director drew on interviews with residents of Reading, Pa., which has been ranked among the poorest cities in the country. (It’s a coincidence, or maybe it isn’t, that both plays concern people from Pennsylvania.)
But Ms. Nottage’s play never feels like a statistics-strewn documentary drama. The play fluidly depicts the conflicts and anxieties simmering among working-class people of all backgrounds in a factory town where the factories have been folding, as of course they have across America, leaving hundreds of thousands without jobs — and seething with the anger that Mr. Trump and, on the other side of the fence, Mr. Sanders have tapped into.
The play is set mostly in a bar where factory workers (and, increasingly, former workers) gather nightly. They struggle to make a living while fighting off the seductive escape of alcohol and drug addiction, with some faring better than others; Ms. Nottage obliquely addresses the slow gutting of the once-mighty union movement. And she explores how the collapse of manufacturing, which once provided opportunities for Americans of all races to better their lives, can potentially stoke racial divisions — and even racially motivated violence.
But with her masterly dramaturgy, and her ability to draw characters whose complex humanity brings us into sympathetic intimacy with their plight, Ms. Nottage’s play, like Mr. Karam’s, puts a recognizable human face on problems that are often debated in the political sphere merely in the abstract. I hope, and expect, “Sweat” will make it to New York next season, when the issues it addresses will probably be just as relevant as they are today.
Both “The Humans” and “Sweat” are, to different degrees, dramas with generous doses of comedy that stick fairly closely to theatrical naturalism, the standard for most American drama, and perhaps an obvious choice for plays addressing the real-world concerns of average folks.
But other playwrights have managed to paint portraits of middle-class angst in more stylized ways. Taylor Mac’s“Hir,”seen last fall at Playwrights Horizons, while not expressly a play about the decline of the middle class, nevertheless tackles the subject in a sidelong manner.
An outlandishly funny comedy about a semi-deranged mother and her two sons (one transgender), it features a near-mute character, the boys’ father, whose life slid into decline when he lost his plumbing job (to a black woman). It was then that he began to abuse both his wife and his younger son (then daughter); the abuse ended only when he had a stroke and lost most of the power of speech and much of his mobility.
While it is by no means a sociological study, Mr. Mac’s play nevertheless speaks — in a cackling voice — to the widely reported difficulties the middle-aged face when they fall out of the work force and cannot find a way back in. The humiliation his wife puts her debilitated husband through (dressing him in garish women’s clothing and makeup) derives from personal — and real — grievances, but it may also be seen as a symbol of the powerlessness being felt by middle-aged white men, for whom death rates have been increasing after years of decline, to the bafflement of researchers.
Annie Baker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Flick,” first seen in 2014 andrevived last yearfor a healthy commercial run Off Broadway, also reflects on economic stagnation, this time in near-rural America. Ms. Baker’s style, here in particular, might almost be called micro-naturalism, in its rigorous attention to the rhythms of real speech and everyday interaction, which are rarely as smooth — or, ahem, as speedy — as they are depicted onstage.
At more than three hours, “The Flick” followed the daily lives of three young adults working at a run-down Massachusetts movie theater. Ms. Baker is about as far as you can get from being a writer of didactic plays, but in its depiction of workers making minimal wages, with little prospect of greater advancement, the play unquestionably speaks, in its quiet voice, to the sense of alienation from the so-called American dream that many young people feel today, and which has fired up the young true believers who are Mr. Sanders’s greatest supporters. (Ms. Baker rose to prominence with atrilogy of playsabout at-loose-ends characters of various ages all living in Mr. Sanders’s home state, Vermont.)
It’s important to remember, of course, that these plays are not hot-off-the-presses dispatches; they have been written and developed over years. The troubles igniting so much furor in middle-class America now go back to at least the Great Recession and in some ways well beyond.
And this latest is not the first batch of plays to depict the hardships of lower- and middle-class lives. Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit,” whichI first saw in Chicagoin 2010, portrays a middle-class couple in an unnamed suburb of an unnamed city (the title was symbolic) who find themselves precipitously close to losing their hold on financial stability when the male half of the couple loses his job as a loan officer.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s“Good People,”seen on Broadway a year later, depicts a middle-aged woman from a blue-collar Boston neighborhood whose life is thrown into jeopardy when she is fired from her job at a dollar store and cannot find another. These two fine plays were among the first to reflect the sense of trepidation that has only grown, the sense that the bright promise of an improving future, or even a stable present, has faded for many Americans.
I should note an unhappy irony at work. While it’s healthy for playwrights to address economic inequality in the country, theater, I’m sorry to say, practically qualifies as a luxury item. Tickets for Broadway shows can cost more than $100 apiece, and Off Broadway prices at the major institutions are not substantially cheaper.
People like those whose lives are being portrayed, with insight and compassion, in the plays I’ve talked about probably couldn’t afford to see them.
