Reviewed by:

• The Folks at Home by R. Eric Thomas, and: Dream House by Eliana Pipes
• Natka Bianchini

In the spring of 2022, Baltimore Center Stage staged back-to-back world premieres of plays written by BIPOC playwrights and featuring multiracial casts and creative teams. Thematically, both pieces centered on the idea of home and what home ownership represents for American families, particularly when applying the lens of race and class to this persistently problematic cornerstone of the American dream. While the productions were not explicitly linked in Center Stage’s promotional materials, the resonance between them was clear and consonant with former Artistic Director Stephanie Ybarra’s mission to transform Baltimore Center Stage into a space of radical inclusivity, committed to equity and social justice.

First up in this pairing was The Folks at Home by Baltimore native R. Eric Thomas.

Thomas is an author, humorist, and writer for stage and screen, who first came to prominence through his hilarious weekly column “Eric Reads the News” published by Elle magazine. His career as a playwright is taking off: in the spring of 2022 he had three major world premieres in quick succession at three different regional theatres, all showcasing his trademark wit and humor.

Christopher Sears (Brandon), E. Faye Butler (Pamela), Eugene Lee (Vernon), and Jane Kaczmarek (Maureen) in The Folks at Home. Photo: Jill Fannon.

The Folks at Home is Thomas’s homage to one of entertainment’s most durable genres—the TV [End Page 97] sitcom. The play is set in the present day, in a Baltimore rowhouse owned by an interracial, married couple, Brandon and Roger Littlefield (Christopher Sears and Brandon E. Burton), who fall on hard times after Roger is laid off from his job as a receptionist at a real estate company. Brandon tends bar at a local seafood joint, but his income alone isn’t enough to keep them afloat, and the play’s conflict centers around how he can convince his husband to list their home for sale and move to a more affordable rental.

Into this familiar premise walk Vernon and Pamela Harrison (Eugene Lee and E. Faye Butler, both stellar), Roger’s parents, and Maureen Littlefield (Jane Kaczmarek, wonderfully zany), Brandon’s mother, all of whom are in need of a place to crash. Like their sons, all three aging parents are struggling financially: Vernon and Pamela’s house is in foreclosure, while Maureen, who aspires to work as a greeter at Walmart, has just been evicted by her landlord. Thomas handles this setup with his typical zingers:

BRANDON:

Look, I’m trying to build something with you.

ROGER:

We did build something. We have a home. And we filled it with old people.

ROGER:

We built a nursing home.

Once they manage to pay the overdue cable bill, the television in the Littlefield home is switched on—and stays on in the background. The audience at the Center Stage production heard snippets of The Jeffersons, Family Matters, and The Cosby Show between scenes. The aural linkages between the quippy one-liners of Thomas’s play, and the inter-generational television sitcoms on which those jokes are based, were clear.

Layered within the comedy, however, was Thomas’s more nuanced exploration of race and class in twenty-first century America. Despite achieving the American dream’s promise of homeownership, Roger and Brandon are still living paycheck to paycheck. Vernon and Pamela both work, but it took just one medical catastrophe (there is an oblique reference to cancer, and the hospital having them on a payment plan) to put them out on the street. In one particularly poignant scene, Pamela talks with her son on the back patio one evening, telling him: “Your father and I are going to have to work til we die, but who isn’t?”

I appreciated Thomas’s focus here on economics, while the fact of Brandon...