This is, if you go by a brief plot summary, a fairly typical family drama play. A group of six family members gather for a tense, existentially ugly Thanksgiving dinner in a cramped Manhattan apartment and we’ve all seen that movie before. But the script is solid and the characters are good as well, so that doesn’t detract at all from what is really this play’s real genius, which is the staging. The play calls for a two level, four room set that makes up this apartment and the play unfolds without an intermission in a single unbroken ninety to a hundred minute act, during which time people are always on stage. One actor is on stage for the entire show and that’s pretty crazy to me, speaking as an actor. But Karam will often have business going on in more room than one at a time; he also utilizes a lot of overlapping dialogue and cross talk. He’ll even occasionally just split the script into two columns that run down the page parallel to each other. What this means is that two separate conversations will be going on at the same time, maybe in different rooms. Sometimes he’ll have a character alone in a room doing a task, like fixing dinner, while the other characters are having a conversation upstairs and he notes at the beginning of the show that every actor must be fully alive and engaged at all times. The audience, he says, may and, in fact, should let their attention wander about the rooms of the apartment as the play progresses. I think what I love about this is that, as a live theater guy, it’s always great to see someone doing something in live theater that you just couldn’t do in any other medium. A play like this justifies that live theater still exists in a time when we have movies and television. This play couldn’t be filmed in the way that its staged and if you tried to film it traditionally, it would be fairly unremarkable, not that the script is bad, just predictable. And this all builds to a really bravura climax where one character is left alone in the apartment and just spirals into a full on panic attack as strange things start to happen. Lights burning out, a door that’s been standing open falling shut, the garbage disposal kicking on loudly, a curtain blowing, etc. There are no real ghosts here, but the final passage of this play is quite scary really as we watch this character, whose nerves have been frayed right down to the edge, collapse emotionally. This is, again, a masterpiece of staging, with almost no dialogue for the last couple of pages. The use of sound design and lighting is exquisite here and this passage is the kind of thing real theater tech nerds live for. I hope to get to see this play actually staged some time. Reading it conjures a palpable atmosphere of emotional chaos and I can only imagine what it would be like when well-staged. 4 stars.
tl;dr – unremarkable, but solid, script features groundbreaking staging and style; a claustrophobic, atmospheric work of American theater. 4 stars.