Stephen Karam’s Plays Treat Anguish as a Laughing Matter
The playwright Stephen Karam has short dark hair, bright dark eyes and a wide smile that occasionally overpowers the rest of his face like some sudden, bloodless coup. On a recent morning at a cafe near his Chinatown apartment in New York, he was eating a red pepper and spinach omelet, a brave attempt to add more vegetables to his diet. At 35, he still looks boyish, and when he talks about being a grown-up, it takes a few seconds to realize that he is actually talking about himself.
“The Humans,” which had its premiere in Chicago last winter, is about a family’s uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner. Credit Michael Brosilow
Mr. Karam specializes in painful comedies that really shouldn’t be as funny as they are. In “Speech & Debate,” which centers on three misfit teenagers, at least two characters have undergone traumatic sexual experiences. But try not to giggle when they cavort in nude body stockings. In “Sons of the Prophet,” an unusual amount of suffering is visited on a Lebanese-American clan. Mr. Karam described it as stemming from “pain in my own life, the pain of loss, of losing people suddenly, physical pain.” It is frequently hilarious.
In “The Humans,” an Irish-American family’s Thanksgiving dinner is dotted with chatter of depression, dementia, illness and the specter of Sept. 11. This, too, is a comedy. At least in part. It is also possibly a horror story.
Mr. Karam’s childhood was neither particularly traumatic nor hilarious. He grew up in Scranton, Pa., the middle child in a Maronite Christian household (his father is Lebanese-American, his mother Irish-American), the same faith that the brothers of “Sons of the Prophet” are raised in. He had comparatively little exposure to theater, although he acted in high school and has vivid memories of listening to the “kla-klang, kla-klang” of a dial-up Internet connection as he tried to find a site that would sell him contemporary plays. The local bookstores had only Shakespeare, he said.
He entered contests for young playwrights as a teenager and sometimes won them. He didn’t know much about the theater or its rules, which was frustrating, but also freeing. “I would write plays that had music in them and plays that didn’t,” he said. “I would write plays that were three minutes long.” They weren’t good plays, he said, but they were simple and honest, “just written from emotion.”
He continued writing and acted occasionally at Brown University, and soon after he was an apprentice at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, where he roomed with the actor Arian Moayed, who is now starring in “The Humans.” There he also met P J Paparelli, a writer and director a few years older than him who was also from Scranton. They began to collaborate on the play that would become “columbinus,” which appeared at New York Theater Workshop in 2006 and most likely prompted the Roundabout to give “Speech & Debate” a look.
Mr. Paparelli, who staged an enthusiastically received production of “The Humans” in Chicago last winter, which The Chicago Tribune called “kind, warm, beautifully observed and deeply moving,” died in a car accident in Scotland four months ago. That loss is still fresh for Mr. Karam. “I don’t want to get into it too deeply,” he said. “I don’t want to go into a rabbit hole of tears over breakfast.”
Mr. Karam’s plays aren’t tearful, but they are often about loss — of love, of health, of innocence — and the messy, haphazard, necessary ways we get on with our lives afterward. He isn’t big on happy endings, but several of his plays offer at least some hope that human connection and resilience will help the characters through. And if that fails, they’ll probably find some other way to keep going.
These are serious subjects, and that suits him. The “serious kid” that he says he was has become a serious adult. He is in a book club with a couple of other playwrights. Their latest pick: “The Brothers Karamazov.” But he has a sly sense of humor and a funny mix of timidity and confidence, which lightens the gravitas.
Sarah Steele, who was in the original “Speech & Debate” and the just-wrapped film version, and who also stars in “The Humans,” described his style as “a jarring naturalism.” Gideon Glick, who appeared with her in “Speech & Debate,” called Mr. Karam’s dialogue “quite uncanny in how natural it sounds.” Both recently joined Mr. Karam on a trip to Paris, where they roamed the cobbled streets singing old Disney songs.
Will that scene appear in a play one day? If you wanted, you could go on a kind of scavenger hunt through Mr. Karam’s memories, checking off the life experiences that inform his writing: He had an obsession with “The Crucible” in high school, as does a character in “Speech & Debate”; he worked in publishing briefly, like the lead in “Sons of the Prophet.” Even the set of “The Humans” is a pastiche of Mr. Karam’s current and former apartments.
“All of my plays are deeply autobiographical,” he said. “But it’s not straight autobiography.” What really interests him, he said, is emotional autobiography: “I don’t know how to produce work if it’s not something that’s deeply scaring me or troubling me.”
If the plays are personal — “The Humans” borrows not only his apartments but also some of his family background and medical history — they also originate, he said, “from a deeply mysterious place.” Here, “the most familiar thing in the world, a family having dinner,” is refracted through the lens of Freud’s essay on the uncanny and García Lorca’s descriptions of his time in New York after the stock market crash of 1929.
“The Humans” shares the focus on family — biological or otherwise — that informs all of Mr. Karam’s work. He remains close to his parents and siblings, but as a gay man, the idea that he will one day have a family of his own has never been a given for him. “It will never be a happy accident for me,” he said.
In this play he gives as much stage time to the older characters (played by Reed Birney and Jayne Houdyshell, among others) as to the younger ones. And while his earlier plays have focused on unsuccessful romantic and sexual relationships, “The Humans” includes two couples, one young, one older, who are trying to make it work. Mr. Karam is mostly silent on the subject of his own relationships, although he did say that he was “just perplexed and amazed and thrilled by what that kind of love is and how hard it can be and how rewarding it can be.”
He has further challenged himself to write a play in real time on a single set. “It freaks me out a bit to lock the doors and see what happens, without blackouts, without relief, without rest,” he said. “That seems like a scary place to go to.”
Still, that’s a place he wants to be. Though his first two films have wrapped, Mr. Karam has resisted writing for television, which has frequently come calling. “Until I have a family or a mortgage, I’m trying to keep my lifestyle simple and my apartment affordable so that I can continue to focus on theater,” he said. “That’s as good as it gets for me.”
He’s working on his next play now. He described it in a follow-up email. It’s about “diseases before they have a name, our cultural obsession with appearance and the challenges of living with disability and chronic illness.”
It’s a comedy.
Source: www.nytimes.com