His plays Sons of the Prophet, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and The Humans were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 and 2016, respectively.
The opera premiered at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College in November 2011, directed by Rebecca Taichman and conducted by Neal Goren.
[15][16] Karam is the Writer in Residence at the 2016 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.
Directed by Simon Godwin, Diane Lane stars as Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Joel Grey (Firs), John Glover (Gaev), Celia Keenan-Bolger (Varya), Harold Perrineau (Lopakhin) and Tavi Gevinson (Anya).
[9][22] The play had its world premiere at the American Theater Company, Chicago, in November 2014,[23] directed by PJ Paparelli.
[28] According to Alexis Soloski (in The New York Times) "Mr. Karam specializes in painful comedies that really shouldn’t be as funny as they are.
In The Humans, an Irish-American family’s Thanksgiving dinner is dotted with chatter of depression, dementia, illness and the specter of Sept. 11.
"[29] Peter Marks, writing in The Washington Post observed: "Through pieces like Speech and Debate, which explored teenage relationships and the questionable morals of a teacher, and Sons of the Prophet, about the travails of a pair of brothers living hand-to-mouth in a small Pennsylvania town, Karam has demonstrated an acute perceptiveness for the ways people lean on one another even as they get under each other’s skins.... Karam says he’s drawn to 'the strangeness in people' who live in a state of dread; it’s the psychological realism of the everyday, it seems, that fires his imagination.