Remember PBS’ AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE series? For 14 years, it presented mostly videotaped adaptations of American plays (along with a few miniseries based on history and literature). A lot were simple productions, basically filmed plays, but they preserved some pretty wonderful scripts and performances, some from stage productions, others created originally for the series. I have particularly fond memories of seeing Blair Brown’s Sabina in the Guthrie Theatre’s production of Thornton Wilder’s THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, John Malkovich and Gary Sinese in Sam Shephard’s TRUE WEST, Richard Thomas and Sada Thompson in Terrence McNally’s ANDRE’S MOTHER, Thomas and Swoosie Kurtz in Lanford Wilson’s FIFTH OF JULY and Anna Deveare Smith in her own FIRES IN THE MIRROR. I’m sure you have your own favorites; feel free to share.
I felt a wave of nostalgia for the series watching Stephen Karam’s adaptation of his own THE HUMANS (2021). I had been very moved by the Broadway production and its depiction of the breakdown of the American family under the pressures of modern life. The Blake family has assembled for Thanksgiving dinner at their younger daughter, Bridget’s seedy Chinatown apartment. The action covers the film’s running time, during which various family crises come to light: elder daughter Aimee has lost her law firm job over health issues while also being dumped by her long-time girlfriend; Bridget has to work as a bartender because her career as a composer-musician is going nowhere; the parents’ marriage also has its share of strains. All this comes out in an atmosphere of family teasing, silly jokes and hurt feelings.
Unfortunately, Karam the director has done a great disservice to Karam the writer. After about half an hour of closeups of moldering walls and backs of heads, shots with walls masking half the action or people out of focus, I screamed at the TV, “For God’s sake, show me some faces!” Jayne Houdyshell, who repeats her award-winning stage performance, gets off the easiest. Karam lets us see her react to things and build to her character’s big moments. Maybe it helped that I’d seen her on stage, so I could fill in the gaps whenever the direction left things out. The rest — Richard Jenkins, Amy Shumer, Beanie Feldstein, Stephen Yuen and June Squibb — all sound great, and there’s a terrifying clarity to some of Squibb’s speeches as the grandmother with Alzheimer’s. I began to wonder if the director hated them, however, and hated Jenkins the most. His big moments in the script are almost totally obscured. There are two places where the "creative" direction works. A move to show the street during the family’s Thanksgiving prayer does a good job of placing the events within a barren cityscape, and the final shot, showing both floors of the apartment at once, captures the poetic moments director Joe Mantello helped create at the play’s end. Pity he didn’t get to direct the film.
