FIVE OF US
Both remarks ignore one fact, however. Even if other people are useless because, well, they’re not us, we still have to live with them. Like it or not, we’re human (and humane) only when we realize that to everybody else, we are other people. And if we deny them reality–i.e., humanity–we lessen ours, often to the point of no return. Call it what you like–“No man is an island,” or a humanist’s theory of relativity–but those who ignore this truth will never be true adults, no matter how old they are.
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By that standard, the four normal people in Len Jenkin’s 1986 Obie-winning Five of Us are dangerous children, frightening just because they’re so familiar. Significantly, a sense of danger is not the first impression the playwright offers; instead his slowly scary play coaxes us into taking the characters seriously–we think we know these practical, reasonable people. The chilling result: what they end up doing implicates us, too, because of the silent sympathy we gave them.
A messenger for the Pony Express service, Herman is obsessed with “mental travel.” Wanting to go from moving things to moving himself, Herman happily calls up 800 numbers to make hotel bookings that he’ll never honor. Despite his dementia, however, it turns out that Herman has a shrewd sense of how he connects with Mark and Lee, these neighbors who ignore him.
Five of Us subverts, just where it seems to support, the too familiar. It pays the audience a compliment that few plays provide–it assumes we can learn from its strategically misguided perceptions, that we’ll forgive a story that stirs up the dark side and refuses to exorcise its dirty discoveries. Since real life never lets you off that easily either, Jenkin does us a big favor.
