Their mother is dying, which is the only reason why Arnold (Brian J. Smith) has – reluctantly – picked up the phone to answer a call by his half-brother Jerry (Paul Starks.) It’s been many years since Arnold moved five thousand miles away from their hometown of Grangeville, Idaho. There are hospital bills to go over, and the will, and power of attorney, but Jerry also wants to reconnect. Arnold says he doesn’t.

“I know you don’t like me very much, but I don’t know why we can’t just talk,” Jerry says.

“It’s not that I don’t like you! I mean I don’t like you but that’s not the issue, plenty of people don’t like their siblings.”

Slowly we learn what the issues are in “Grangeville,” the latest play by Samuel D. Hunter that is, much like his others, quiet, insightful, ultimately moving. If your relationship with a sibling is complicated – and whose isn’t? – it hits home. At the same time, though, the production, which opens tonight at Signature Theater, might require a little more work on the part of the audience, thanks to a few challenging choices by both Hunter and director Jack Serio.

The play is set in “a void and liminal space,” rather than Idaho, and both the scenic design by dots and the lighting design by Stacey Derosier rarely let you forget it. The first twenty minutes of the play take place entirely in the dark. One can find this annoying even as one appreciates it thematically: We are initially in the dark about these two men. Then we are enlightened. Jerry, ten years old than Arnold, sells RVs in Grangeville and is living in the trailer where the two of them grew up – where their mother lived until she was moved to the hospital. Arnold, who has become an artist, lives with his husband, a museum educator, in Rotterdam.

We come to understand that Arnold and Jerry are also in the dark about each other, and – as it turns out– each is also in the dark about himself.

Much enlightenment arrives because of another unusual choice. “Grangeville” features two actors, but four characters. Without warning, Arnold storms out, and Jerry is suddenly talking to his wife Stacy (as portrayed by Smith), who had asked him to leave their home and wants a divorce. (That’s why he is living in his mother’s trailer.)  Later, Jerry disappears, and Arnold is talking to his husband Bram (as portrayed by a Dutch-accented Sparks); they too are having difficulties in their marriage.

What we learn is that Jerry and Arnold grew up with a neglectful mother and abusive father/stepfather – and that Jerry, ten years older than Arnold, gave him a hard time…for wanting to be an artist, for not being macho.

“I was just trying to toughen him up,” he says to his wife.

“By ‘toughen him up’ do you mean beat the shit out of him?”

Jerry hangs his head.  “Yeah. That’s probably a more accurate way to put it.”

But then Jerry says: “I’m not saying I didn’t mess up a ton, believe me, but—it wasn’t all like that” – and then catalogues the ways he protected and even entertained his little brother. “I just wish he could remember that stuff, too. It’s like he’s taken the worst parts of me, and he’s just decided that it’s all that I am.”

In his scene with his spouse, Arnold comes to realize that he never really left Grangeville, not emotionally (hence the title)

There’s something touching and deeply admirable about the respect that Hunter pays to his characters: Yes they are struggling, floundering even, but they are hoping for something better; they make mistakes, but they are capable of a self-awareness and a hard-earned wisdom that transcends levels of economic class or education. 

For fifteen years now, Hunter has created such characters, almost all of whom have grown up in Idaho (as did he, although he now lives in Brooklyn with his husband John Baker, who is the dramaturg for this play.) These characters live and breathe in plays that should be better known – especially “Lewiston/Clarkston” (2018), “Greater Clements” (2019), and “A Case for the Existence of God”  (2022.)  Hunter, a winner of a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship, is probably best known to the public at large now for “The Whale, because he adapted it into a movie starring Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his performance as an obese gay man from Idaho who tries to restore his relationship with his teenage daughter, whom he abandoned years ago. 

Fraser was originally cast in “Grangeville,” but dropped out “due to unforeseen circumstances.” He was to play the role of Jerry, who is trying to restore his relationship with Arnold, whom he taunted years ago. (It’s Arnold who did the abandoning, if that’s the right word.)

An Oscar winner theoretically would have had an easier time drawing in the audience that this production deserves. But there is something that felt so right about the pairing of Smith and Sparks. Both are talented, accomplished actors, yes, with impressive credits of their own, and I shows. But is there anything to their also being sons of the heartland (Sparks from Lawton, Oklahoma, Smith from Allen, Texas), one married with two children, the other gay – exactly like their characters?

Grangeville
Signature Theater through March 16
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $78 – $177
Written by Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by Jack Serio
Scenic design by dots, costume design by Ricky Reynoso, lighting design by Stacey Derosier, sound design by Chris Darbassie, and dramaturgy by John Baker.
Cast: Brian J Smith and Paul Sparks