Laurie Metcalf as Sarah in rubber gloves and Micah Stock as Ethan in a face mask stand in front of a lone couch, making awkward chit-chat until she finally says:
“I’m, uh. Sorry about your dad.”
“Sorry about your brother,” he replies
Both Sarah and her nephew Ethan express their condolences oddly – as if in air quotes, something they know they should be saying but that they don’t really mean.
We learn later that Leon was a meth addict, someone his sister avoided and his son escaped. Aunt and nephew, reuniting during the peak of the pandemic, haven’t seen each other in years.
It’s one of the many small, revealing moments in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” the latest quietly amusing and powerfully affecting drama by Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright making his long-deserved Broadway debut. Like the many excellent plays I’ve seen Off-Broadway written by Hunter over the past dozen years, all of which are set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho – The Whale in 2013 (which was made into a 2023 movie that snagged Brendan Fraser an Academy Award); “Lewiston/Clarkston” (2018), “Greater Clements” (2019), and especially “A Case for the Existence of God” (2022), as well as last season’s Grangeville. – “Little Bear Ridge Road” somehow transforms what seems to be a simple story about ordinary people into a cosmic contemplation of loss and hope.
Like Hunter, Ethan is a writer, but unlike the prolific playwright, Ethan has stopped writing completely by the time he has traveled from Seattle back to Idaho after his father’s death at the height of the pandemic. Ethan’s fiction was inspired largely by his own life, as he explains to Sarah, and “I didn’t like my main character.”
Sarah, a longtime nurse, is winding down her career – or rather, the hospital is doing this for her, giving her fewer and fewer shifts. Divorced and childless, she has moved to a house that’s so remote that she has to drive half an hour to get her groceries. “Just suits me better not being around people,” she says to Ethan.
Ethan’s plan, to the extent that he has one, is to stay in Idaho – maybe in a hotel – just until he can sell his father’s house, and he’ll then take off for…somewhere; he doesn’t know where. Seattle isn’t a good option; he had a traumatic breakup with an overly controlling boyfriend. Sarah offers Ethan the spare bedroom in her house. Ethan stays for two years.
In that time we learn the big secret that largely explains Sarah’s reclusiveness, and the long-ago reason for Ethan’s resentment of Sarah. Mostly, we get to know them as they get to know each other, and although they are testy with one another, they also (albeit reluctantly) come to care for one another. Several other characters come into their orbit, mostly in voiceover phone calls, but Ethan meets James (John Drea) in person after connecting on the Internet. He is at the university studying astrophysics. They clumsily, tentatively develop a relationship – which Ethan doesn’t seem ready for, much to our sorrow.
There is a moment, though, when Sarah and James have sat on the couch together watching the last episode of a TV series, and now the three of them are arguing about it, passionately – which is funny, but also inviting; they feel like a family.
Television figures prominently in the play; they spend a lot of time watching it (looking out at the audience as if we’re the TV), and arguing about it. At one point, Sarah gets furious when Ethan asks whether there are still such things as TV channels anymore – an indication of a generation gap. The presence of TV feels symbolic, meant to emphasize their remoteness from their own lives.
There is also much talk of the stars in the sky, which are startlingly visible in rural Idaho, far from the “pollution” of lights in a city:
“When I was a kid, I had all the constellations memorized,” James tells Ethan.
“So in other words you weren’t sitting at the cool kid table,” Ethan responds.
“That’s an understatement.”
“Little Bear Ridge Road” is the name of the actual road in a remote part of Idaho where Hunter’s father lived, but the title also evokes this sense of being away from the center of things.
In other words, without getting cloyingly arty about it, what helps make “Little Bear Ridge Road” such an exquisitely sad yet beautiful play is that we are asked to consider these specific lonely individuals with vulnerable bodies and fragile psyches but also to see them in the context of the vastness of the world.
Laurie Metcalf and director Joe Mantello commissioned Hunter to write “Little Bear Ridge Road” and it’s difficult to imagine a production of it with a better cast or more attentive director. The actors are allowed to take their time — to look at the screen on their smart phone, or vacuum the floor, in silence, the way an actual person might, rather than keep up the pace of the dialogue, as a character would.
Scott Pask’s scenic design might seem a little…spare…for Broadway. It’s just the couch. Sure it’s shiny, maybe showroom-worthy; it even unfolds. Still, it’s a couch. But that couch becomes the back of the bar where Ethan meets James, and the locus of the makeshift family that James, Sarah and Ethan develop, and the site of some sadder moments in the lives of these people. At some points, it seems to represent the barrier between the characters; at other times, the family’s legacy. The couch started to symbolize their universe. Only in a production directed by Joe Mantello of a play written by Samuel D. Hunter could a couch feel so cosmic.
Little Bear Ridge Road
Booth Theater through February 8
Running time: 95 minutes without intermission.
Tickets: $74 – $311 (Digital rush and lottery: $49)
Directed by Joe Mantello
Scenic design by Scott Pask, costume design by Jessica Pabst, lighting design by Heather Gilbert, and sound design by Mikhail Fiksel.
Cast: Laurie Metcalf as Sarah, Micah Stock as Ethan, John Drea as James and Meighan Gerachis as Paulette.
Photos by Julieta Cervantes
