“The Humans” has been called a comedy, a drama — and one of the best plays of the year. Its playwright, Stephen Karam, calls it a “family thriller,”one that explores, with some supernatural flourishes, the very human fear of loss: of love, money and life itself. A Pulitzer Prize finalist — and the play to beat at the Tonys — “The Humans” is set in a dingy duplex in Chinatown, where a middle-class Scranton, Pa., family gathers for what turns out to be an unsettling Thankgiving. “That duplex is based on a place I lived for six years,” says Karam, who grew up in Scranton, teaches at the New School and now lives in Chinatown, albeit in a sunny apartment.
Here’s what’s in this writer’s library:
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
This is by a psychoanalyst, and it’s riveting — it’s part of my class syllabus at the New School. It’s very Chekhovian. To see someone unpack the human condition from his experience with patients leaves you wiser about yourself, chapter by chapter — and each chapter reads like a great short story.
Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser
I’m drawn to writers with skill sets I don’t have. Rukeyser [1913-1980] was an activist and spent a lot of her life writing about causes she believed in. This is about the Hawks Nest tunnel disaster in West Virginia, where hundreds of miners died from unsafe industrial practices. Rukeyser took testimony and her own experiences of being in West Virginia and created this poem.
The Poet in New York by F. Garcia Lorca
In writing “The Humans,” I obsessed over the financial district and the architecture . . . Lorca was in 1929 during the stock-market crash and saw people jumping from buildings. The things he witnessed from Coney Island to Columbia University [where he was a student] are captured in a way that makes us see the city we know as strange and new again.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
After writing a piece that dealt so much with family relationships, I wanted to get lost in a family that was new to me. This is a classic I’ve been meaning to read for years. It’s about family and how people change, how we love each other and how we perceive each other. It’s magical.