‘Human Things’ – Riveting

By Alix Cohen

“If we stop (research/conservation) now, everything’s going to go. So we have to keep doing our best for as long as we can, and if we’re going to die, let’s die fighting.” Jane Goodall

Margaret (Rebecca Robles), an avian ecologist, and her husband Greg (Ben Rosenfield), an engineer, are based, for her work, on a remote, otherwise uninhabited Pacific atoll. She’s engrossed. Greg struggles with purpose.

Having gone to collect samples, Margaret has slept on a beach provoked by uncharacteristic night driving insecurity. She’s more than a little miffed her mate wasn’t sufficiently concerned to come to find her. He shrugs away confrontation by praising her independence.

The evocative set (Jacob Bers) features cane furniture with a table at each end of the room, one with radio equipment, the other a food station also piled with books and a microscope – his and hers. A marvelously conceived canopy looks like tented parachute silk.

Aware of climate crisis, the young woman is torn.“I’m going to collect the data to show exactly how fucked we are…Maybe I should embrace the hopelessness.” “Buddhists say it’s the hope that kills us”, Greg responds, then immediately suggests sex. Cue creaky bed springs.

At one point, without naming it, they refer to the true 1929 utopian tragedy of Floreana Island: Two competitive, European ex-pat couples tried to live self sufficiently in a place with limited resources and mysteriously ended up dead. It’s a helluva storey and a warning.*

Into this fragile dynamic comes Bo (Michael Mulheren) a big, gregarious, seventy-something man whose wife Darce (Victoria Clark) was injured when their boat crashed into an island reef. He’s in search of first aid. Greg is suspicious. What are they doing so far from civilization?! Margaret goes with Bo to bring back Darce.

An otherwise practical and rather ‘nice’ man, Bo seems oddly untroubled by being stranded. Darce is a messy, larger than life personality and unapologetically demanding. While he personifies hope, she stands for humanity’s unpredictability. They’ve been sweethearts since childhood.

The older couple unwittingly act as catalysts holding a mirror to Margaret and Greg, breaking down a wall of silence that’s grown between them. When they go at one another, Darce offers to lead them through breathing exercises.

At the start of the human storm, a category 5 typhoon is announced on the radio. The “shit box” that contains a binder with severe weather instructions has been misplaced. The storm hits. It’s wonderfully manifest, particularly effective in the small theater. (Lighting – Reza Behjat, Sound- Ian Scot) Everyone realizes there’s a good chance they’ll die. Black out.
We’re asked to leave the theater during scene change.

Act II reveals another splendid set, this one depicting the aftermath. Survivors are dirty and wounded, blood and wounds realistically depicted. Exhaustion pervades. One visitor is badly injured, one missing. The radio is dead. Life and death hang in the balance. Contentious moral choices erupt. When everything else disappears, resentment, connection, and views of the future remain – human things.

Greg introduces a new element into their battered midst. (Visual here is the first that feels overboard.) Violence ensues. You’ll exit with questions, theories.

Joshua Owen’s play addresses both macro and micro choices we face as homo sapiens. Some will be familiar, some jarringly not so much. Characters have real personality, His denouement is strikingly original. Source of a final wound leaves out information.

All four actors are excellent.Greg (Ben Rosenfield) is a bit less well manifest, but also less specifically written. Margaret (Rebecca Robles) ably lets us see every thought and feeling map her face. As Bo, Michael Mulheren feels warm, solid familiar.

Victoria Clark, of whom I’m a FAN, adroitly plays to the quicksilver and dry humor aspects of Darce. Bristling or crookedly smiling, we accept the whole character. There is, however, one parentheses when apt pain is more likely to surface more than it does.

Direction by Rory McGregor utilizes the confined space with variation and credibility. Relationships are well drawn. Anger, affection, intimacy, and fights (the latter by Rick Sordolet) emerge just right.

Costumes illuminate character. After the storm, results are not over the top. (Amanda Roberge)

The play is riveting- smart, imaginative and provocative.

Photos by Emilio Madrid

*Films about Floreana include 2024’s Eden and 2013’s The Galapagos Affair- Satan Came to Eden

Human Things by Joshua Owen
Directed by Rory McGregor
The West End Theatre at St. Paul St. Andrew UMC
263 West 86 St. 2nd floor