The real-life spouses behind ‘Human Things’ are taking control of their artistic careers

Playwright Joshua Owen and actor Rebeca Robles team up on the Off-Broadway drama about, somewhat ironically, two troubled couples facing a changing, out-of-control world.

Summary

• Real-life spouses Joshua Owen and Rebeca Robles collaborate for the first time on the world-premiere play Human Things
• Owen wrote the play; Robles stars as a despairing scientist in a crumbling marriage; and both co-produce
• The two discuss the inspirations for the show; their personal and professional collaboration; elements of the show that mirror their own lives; and why they wanted to make their own work

For real-life spouses Joshua Owen and Rebeca Robles, staging an Off-Broadway play about a marriage on the brink of collapse wasn’t just a professional endeavor, but a new frontier in their own partnership that's, in contrast, far from crumbling. The world premiere of Human Things, playing at the West End Theatre off Broadway from September 12 to October 18, marks a creative milestone for Owen, who wrote the script, and Robles, who stars in the drama and serves as a co-producer with Owen.

“We’ve produced together before, but this is the first time Josh has written something I’m also acting in and that we’re also producing together,” Robles said. “It’s a new frontier for us entirely.”

“It’s been delightful,” she added. “I’ve had so much fun being able to let Josh into my process as an actor because he has been with me through my whole journey trying to build this career, but has always been sort of on the outside of it.”

Robles plays Margaret, a scientist stationed on a remote South Pacific atoll to study a declining population of migratory birds. She is isolated there alongside her husband, Greg (Boardwalk Empire's Ben Rosenfield), who, like Margaret, struggles to find his purpose in the shadow of environmental ruin. It's a story, Owen said, about “reckoning with what it means to be a person who’s paying attention and recognizes that these are perhaps not great times, but knowing you still have to live your life and figure out how to balance that tension.”

Margaret, for one, “genuinely believes her research can make a difference until the weight of the crisis makes her feel like nothing matters,” Robles said. “And then we push through that despair, realizing there is still action we can take to fix things.”

The inspiration for the play, which Owen began writing about six years ago, stems from both these real-world concerns and structural ambition. Owen was inspired by an interview in which actor Bill Irwin discussed a theory of the late visionary director Mike Nichols: that the classic plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Waiting for Godot share the same fundamental structure.

“They're both about this couple who have issues and these other people who show up and blow it all open, and then they leave,” said Owen. “When I first decided to start writing, I began thinking, ‘I understand that structure. I’m going to start with that,’” said Owen.

Human Things's turning point arrives when an older couple, Darce (two-time Tony Award winner Victoria Clark) and Bo (Tony nominee Michael Mulheren), crash their boat into a nearby coral reef and upend Greg and Margaret’s fragile, isolated routine. While the play is not autobiographical, Robles noted that glimpses of her and Owen's lives organically bled into the narrative; they isolated together in New Haven while Robles studied at the Yale School of Drama during the pandemic. “Greg and Margaret are in no way representative of me and Josh or our dynamic, but it is funny how our specific circumstance at the time did make its way into the play,” Robles said.

As the play progresses, a catastrophic typhoon bears down on the island, forcing both couples to confront their bonds, their mortality, and a mysterious, impossibly large egg unearthed from the wreckage. Together with director Rory McGregor, Owen capitalized on the site-specific design of the West End Theatre to realistically render the hurricane and the climactic reveal of the egg without a Broadway-sized budget.

Beyond creative fulfillment, mounting a commercial Off-Broadway production gave Owen and Robles an empowering opportunity to take charge of their artistic careers. “The nature of the market right now is you have to create your own work,” Owen said. “It’s really hard, even with a Yale Drama degree, to come out into the world and get booked consistently. There was real intention behind being people who create work for ourselves so we can then, maybe, go do other things.”

“We aren’t doing it this way for any other reason than this was the only way to do it,” he continued. “But also, [...] it has allowed us to be more in control of our own product as a result.” If not climate change, that's at least one thing they can control.

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Top image credit: Joshua Owen and Rebeca Robles in rehearsal for Human Things. (Photos by Rebecca J. Michelson)
In-article image credit: Human Things off Broadway. (Photos by Emilio Madrid)