The Decline of White, Middle-Aged America, Onstage

The first time I saw “The Humans,” Stephen Karam’s funny and frightening drama, which played Off Broadway last fall, was the same week that news broke of an alarming new study. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans,” the Times put it. Two economists from Princeton, Angus Deaton and Anne Case, had found that the death rate of middle-aged white Americans, unlike that of their counterparts of other ethnicities and in other well-off countries, was going up, for reasons that have something to do with substance abuse, particularly with alcohol and opioids. Suicides among this group have also increased at an unprecedented rate. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” Deaton told the Times. The news seemed less like a diagnosis than like a disturbing enigma. But the thought occurred to me: Karam knows something about this.