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Alana Hawley Purvis, Laurie Paton, Sara Farb and Maralyn Ryan in the play The Humans at Canadian Stage in Toronto.Epic Photography

The Tony Award for best play is hardly ever an indicator of what's really interesting or fresh in American drama, which hardly ever makes it to or thrives in the intense commercial atmosphere of Broadway.

The Humans, which won the Tony in 2016, is the rare exception – and you can see a production of it as exciting and unsettling as the original one in New York right now at Canadian Stage.

On the surface, Stephen Karam's work seems like a type of play that's been done to death: A family gathers for dinner, everyone has too much to drink, secrets are revealed.

But Karam's writing is part of a new American school of naturalism (Annie Baker is its No. 1 practitioner) that has reinvigorated the style in recent years. Everything seems so real in his script that it takes on a surreal character. Everything feels so natural that it begins to feel supernatural. It's like the uncanny valley of theatre.

The Humans sees three generations of the Irish-American Blake family gathering in a strange, two-floor flat in New York's Chinatown for Thanksgiving.

Brigid Blake (Sara Farb), a musician and composer who makes her living as a bartender, has recently moved in with her older boyfriend, Richard (Richard Lee), a trust-fund kid nearing middle age, and they're hosting her family for the first time.

Parents Erik (Ric Reid), a school custodian, and Deirdre (Laurie Paton), an office manager, have driven in from Scranton, Penn., along with grandmother Momo (Maralyn Ryan), who is in a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. (It's not one of her good days, as Erik and Deirdre keep saying.)

Brigid's sister Aimee (Alana Hawley Purvis), a lawyer, has come in from Philadelphia. She seems to be the family member most obviously in crisis, suffering from ulcerative colitis, recently broken up with her girlfriend and having just learned that she's not making partner.

But gradually, over a real-time three-course dinner played out over two floors and much overlapping conversation, it becomes clear that Aimee may have the strongest constitution of the bunch.

The Humans is a very funny play, it should be emphasized, with of-the-moment spins on age-old arguments about religion and marriage and money. The generational war between millennials and boomers over who has the actual sense of entitlement (and/or economic raw deal) is on full display, but in a low-key, well-observed way. There are no plates smashed, and nothing purposefully nasty is said. Instead, this is a family accidentally wounding itself, using a bucket of ranch dip or a Virgin Mary statue as weapons. You're hit by waves of laughter, then sadness – or vice versa.

Meanwhile, there's a lot going on under the conventional surface of the play. Erik, seen first and last on stage, has been having nightmares that are now seeping into his waking life – and we seem to catch glimpses of his subconscious in the set designed by Judith Bowden.

There's a window into a cigarette butt-filled alley (Brigid calls it an "interior courtyard) that Erik looks out with trepidation, off-putting thumps from the apartment above that spook him, and lights that flicker or go out ominously and make him sweat.

While The Humans has the atmosphere of a horror movie, the terror – minus a few mentions of 9/11 – comes entirely in existential form, most chillingly in Momo's sudden shouted streams of Beckettian babble.

American decline is the theme – or, at least, white America's fear of decline, especially in struggling blue-collar families like the Blakes. (The casting of amiable Chinese-Canadian actor Lee as Brigid's boyfriend softens the "yellow peril" element of this downwardly mobile Irish-American family's paranoia over the noises made by Brigid's Chinese neighbours.)

This co-production with Edmonton's Citadel Theatre reunites former Shaw Festival artistic director Jackie Maxwell with two of her era's stars, Reid and Paton. The material is just right for Maxwell – Karam's work a blend of Anton Chekhov, William Inge and Sean O'Casey, all playwrights she showed a deep affinity with in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Reid is perfectly cast and gives an exceptional blue-collar performance as the guilt-ridden but judgmental Erik – you feel for him but never entirely like him. I've seen Paton play upper-class so often at the Shaw Festival that I wasn't sure if she was struggling to take a step down the economic ladder here or if I was struggling to get past my preconceptions of her as an actor. But she eventually got me right in the gut, depicting Deidre as a comedian constantly, cruelly getting the hook from her family.

Farb is impeccable as a youngest-child millennial, aggrieved but frequently making a fair point, while Hawley Purvis brings a potent mix of strength and vulnerability to the older sister. Ryan is terrifying in an awfully difficult part, howling away on the outside the way the other humans only are on the inside.

The Humans (canadianstage.com) continues to Feb. 25.

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