"Samuel D. Hunter's "Little Bear Ridge Road," directed by Joe Mantello at the Booth, on Broadway, is a small, quiet drama set in a large, quiet corner of the country. We're somewhere in rural Idaho, far from light pollution and the people who cause it-and, even if you've never been up among the Idaho buttes, this vision of a dark, empty world may feel familiar."
"Ethan (Micah Stock) has come back home to sell his late father's house. Ethan can't grieve, exactly; the two hadn't spoken in years, their relationship shattered by his father's decades of drug use. But Ethan is nonetheless adrift: he's left an abusive boyfriend in Seattle, and his plans to be a writer have come to nothing. When he drives up the remote Little Bear Ridge Road to check in with his estranged aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), she brusquely installs him in her guest room."
"Hunter was raised in Moscow, Idaho, not far from the setting of Sarah's house. A gifted realist and an excavator of a particular American loneliness, he often names his slice-of-alienated-life plays after towns in his home state: "A Bright New Boise," "Lewiston," and the recent "Grangeville," which premièred in February at the Signature. For "Little Bear Ridge Road," which was originally a commission for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre and now marks Hunter's Broadway début,"
The play is set in 2020 on a remote road in rural Idaho, capturing vast stillness and pandemic-era isolation. Ethan returns to sell his late father's house, unable to grieve after years of estrangement caused by the father's drug addiction. Ethan has fled an abusive boyfriend in Seattle and abandoned his stalled ambitions to be a writer. His estranged aunt Sarah brusquely houses him, and two COVID years pass as they mark time by watching television together. The production emphasizes quiet realism, small moments of domestic tension, and American loneliness, measuring the slippery passage of time in season finales.
Read at The New Yorker
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