Theatre in Review: Little Bear Ridge Road (Booth Theatre)

	Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Like many of Samuel D. Hunter's plays, Little Bear Ridge Road is a miniature that contains multitudes. Focusing on a trio of characters in his home state of Idaho, a stretch of the Northwest he has made his personal literary property, Hunter untangles a tragic family history while capturing something essential about this moment in America's great unraveling. Watching it, one recalls W. H. Auden's admonition, "We must love one another or die." But what if the people involved don't know how?

We are on the outskirts of Troy, Idaho, a distant outpost even in that sparsely populated state. Sarah, a nurse in her sixties, is unexpectedly faced with Ethan, her nephew, who has arrived from Seattle to settle his late father's estate, which consists of little more than a rotting, tumbledown house and a few power tools. To be sure, the men weren't exactly close, and forgiveness is not on offer. "He called me three or four years ago asking for forty bucks," Ethan says. "When I didn't give it to him, he called me a faggot, so. That was that." "You know that was the drugs talking," Sarah says. "It was also him talking," Ethan replies.

Ethan and Sarah, both of whom are at crossroads that might be dead ends, aren't exactly on the best of terms, either. An aspiring writer, armed with an MFA, he has more or less given up. (Working in a bookstore, he notes, "constantly surrounded by works by published writers" is "a little dispiriting.") He is also fresh from a relationship with a corporate lawyer that turned abusive thanks to the latter's drug use and paranoia. Sarah's hospital has been sold to a for-profit enterprise, and her job is being slowly whittled down to nothing. Not that they are prepared to comfort each other: Long divorced, without children, and flintily independent, she is totally unprepared for a houseguest. He still resents that she failed to save him from his meth-addicted dad. When Sarah asks, "He never did drugs in front of you, though, right?," the pregnant silence that follows fills the Booth Theatre with dismay.

Surprisingly, the early scenes of Little Bear Ridge Road are often hilarious, in part because Sarah is played by Laurie Metcalf, her bluntly practical manner reducing the most sensitive situation to its basic (and embarrassing) nuts and bolts. "All this time you thought I had an issue with you being gay?" she queries Ethan. "That's the most interesting thing about you." (Unspoken is the assumption that it is his only notable feature.) Wandering offstage to make up a bed, she twice bellows, 'You need a top sheet?," each time earning an enormous laugh; clearly her hostessing skills have been allowed to wither. (Told no, she replies with satisfaction, "Good, because I don't have one," landing a third laugh.) Their bickering over the nonsensical plot of a streaming video series, about a family of possible outer-space aliens, provides a comic ring of familiarity.

Even as Ethan and Sarah fall into a regular pattern, they are hardly intimate; only by accident does he discover that she is critically ill with colon cancer. At the same time, warily and without fanfare, he begins seeing James, a graduate student in astrophysics, who, despite his own complicated family, is grounded in a way that has always eluded Ethan. One of the play's most amusing and touching moments occurs when Sarah discovers James sneaking out of the house one morning. During the three-way fracas that ensues, Ethan lets the word "boyfriend" slip out, causing James' face to glow and Sarah to give a one-word verdict ("adorable") that, to Ethan's obvious discomfort, reframes a casual fling into something more.

After this, the three fall into a rough approximation of a family until it appears that James may be offered a place at a university in Chicago. Suddenly, tenuous alliances seem real, and choices must be made. Ethan, stunned to feel so responsible for Sarah's well-being, suddenly feels deserted by his lover; dogged by a sense of failure and worried about the past repeating itself, he fears becoming an addendum to James' career. When James, who comes from money, makes a startlingly generous offer, Ethan, triggered, lashes out at him, his anger fueled by a lifetime's worth of unresolved resentments. Sarah, who refuses to be the reason for her nephew's bad decisions, tries to send him away, cueing a furious confrontation that leads him to cry out, "I don't know how to be a person in this terrible fucking nightmarish world!"

It's a poignant tale of people who would love each other if only they had the tools, set against a background that will be sadly familiar to anyone who follows the news. Hunter is the rare American playwright whose works keep tabs on our fraying social fabric from social isolation, addiction, medical deserts, a failing economy, and family ties stretched to the breaking point. Without making speeches, he vividly illustrates how the American ideal of self-reliance has, in this century, curdled into a killing loneliness. To quote the title of Robert D. Putnam's book, everyone in Little Bear Ridge Road is bowling alone, a condition that is bad for their souls.

There's a marvelous economy about Joe Mantello's production, beginning with Scott Pask's set design, featuring not much more than an expansive couch on a turntable, a solution that allows the action to unfold without a pause; Heather Gilbert's lighting fills in the rest, using saturated colors in a bar scene and flickering effects to suggest the constant presence of a TV set. Jessica Pabst's costumes help to clarify the characters' down-market circumstances. Mikhail Fikel 's sound design plays a crucial role in a pair of phone conversations with offstage characters, each of which conveys important information.

Mantello's direction is acutely observant and ruthlessly honest. Micah Stock, warily eyeing even the friendliest face for hostile impulses, his voice rife with irony and muted outrage, captures Ethan's profound woundedness and reflexively self-protective attitude. He can also be very funny; wait for the moment when, on the phone, he adopts Sarah's scorched-earth tactics when dealing with medical-coverage bureaucrats, pausing mid-tirade to make a casual remark to Sarah. In the play's most heartbreaking scene, he turns away from James, shutting him out while scrolling on his phone. Metcalf, one of the gutsiest actors alive, makes Sarah bracingly plainspoken about her illness, and she doesn't shy away from showing its ravaging effects; despite her obsidian surface, she reveals a terrible vulnerability when admitting she failed to save Ethan from his horrendous circumstances.

John Drea, a Chicago-based actor (the production, like so many others of note, began at Steppenwolf Theatre Company), is consistently touching as James, who offers a kind of unselfish love that, in Ethan's skewed vision, looks like a trap. Another Chicago performer, Meighan Gerachis, makes a nice eleventh-hour appearance as a home healthcare worker, reading a story to Sarah that provides the play with its affecting signoff.

As noted, Little Bear Ridge Road is a small-scale piece, running eighty minutes, but its impact is more potent than many more expansive works, thanks to Hunter's ability to pack every moment with meaning. It is both a powerful account of love misdirected and a bulletin from a hurting American heartland. Hunter's Idaho may seem remote to most of us, but it deserves our urgent attention. --David Barbour