Review: Little Bear Ridge Road, Samuel D. Hunter’s Must-See Broadway Debut

The couch is practically a fourth character in Samuel D. Hunter’s new drama Little Bear Ridge Road, which marks the acclaimed playwright’s Broadway debut. Upholstered in an ugly light tan leather, it’s the kind of sofa built for comfort rather than beauty, sporting a central foldout panel with cupholders and reclining functions on both ends. The only item of furniture on the circular platform at the center of Scott Pask’s simultaneously spare and cavernous set, it looks like the star attraction in a Raymour & Flanigan showroom, the cushy consolation prize for losing the American rat race.

We first see Ethan (Micah Stock) and his aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) standing in front of the couch—her couch. It’s 2020 and Ethan has returned from Seattle to Troy, Idaho to settle his recently deceased father’s estate, which sounds a lot grander than the $8,000 he will receive once he sells dad’s house and pays off his debt. Sarah knows Ethan doesn’t have money for a hotel and will probably sleep in his car rather than crash at the childhood home he now owns, the place where he suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his meth-addicted parent. She offers him her spare bedroom.

In the limbo of the pandemic, weeks turn into months turn into years. Ethan has no desire to return to his old life as an unpublished writer and retail worker in Seattle. Nor does he see a clear path back out of Idaho. But he finds purpose in caring for Sarah, who is privately struggling with her health. Ethan is determined to help her, whether she wants it or not.

Hunter’s play Grangeville, which made its world premiere earlier this year at Signature Theatre, was similarly powered by the tension between personal aspiration and family obligation, a specter that eventually haunts all Americans. In the grand sweep of history, we are odd ducks for regularly choosing personal fulfillment over filial piety. But what if your father is a dead drug addict? What if your dream career never panned out? And what if you face rejection even in your fallback position as a not particularly skilled trad nephew? This is the awful fate Ethan shares with millions of Americans who have been relegated to the clearance shelf of the marketplace of human capital. Their voices are rarely heard on a Broadway stage, which makes Little Bear Ridge Road a tiny miracle of the fall season.

We can feel Ethan’s percolating dread in every brilliant beat of Stock’s cringe-manufacturing performance. His eye-rolling deadpan is the unmistakable affectation of a gay man who has learned to feign casual disinterest as a defense mechanism. If he cannot find a purpose, maybe there is no purpose to anything. When he finally allows that emotional dam to break, it drowns the audience in a deluge of tears.  Stock is a notably ugly crier.

While he always sounds a little drunk, his diction is particularly fuzzy (without ever surrendering to incoherence) in the scene in which he first meets James (John Drea), a master’s student at the nearby University of Idaho. They meet at a bar for a Grindr date, and it’s clear that Ethan is expecting more grind than date. “I’m not gonna like, suck your dick at the Wagon Wheel,” James tells him, and Ethan’s disappointment is palpable.

Yet both men stick around and form something resembling a relationship. Is it convenience or true love?  Drea makes a convincing argument for the latter in a beautiful and emotionally unguarded performance. Late in the play, when James makes a breathtakingly vulnerable admission, Ethan responds by retreating into his phone. The inane drone of back-to-back Instagram reels has never sounded more devastating.

“I’m tired of being your excuse, Ethan,” Sarah tells him in one of her more serious lines, which lands with the impact of a meteorite. Hunter has clearly tailored Sarah’s lines to Metcalf’s distinctive voice, and that bespoke treatment pays off throughout the play’s 90 minutes (it was a Steppenwolf commission, and brought Metcalf back to their Chicago stage last year for the first time in decades).

Metcalf fracks humor from the dourest of circumstances, earning laughs through her singular portrayal of an older woman who is a bit set in her ways and would like to be left alone. Yet her kindness is unmistakable. It’s the strange combination of care and emotional detachment that one frequently finds in a longtime nurse like Sarah.

Director Joe Mantello wisely understands that he need not do much to garnish such tremendously rich performances, which are the main attraction of Little Bear Ridge Road. Jessica Pabst’s costumes convey affordable comfort (Metcalf is wearing the exact socks my sister once bought me for a Christmas stocking-stuffer). Sound designer Mikhail Fiksel walks the border between banality and magic, creating little noises from the prestige television dramas that our characters, seated on the couch, consume while eating from little ceramic bowls—bread and circuses for the age of social atomization. Heather Gilbert’s subtly suggestive lighting brings us out of Sarah’s living room and occasionally astounds us with the adamantine enormity of Pask’s upstage wall, which suggests a world that will endure beyond our brief and transient lives.

But those fleeting moments are where we live, and they deserve attention and care. Little Bear Ridge Road is a quietly triumphant debut for Hunter, an American playwright who sees the country we truly inhabit, rather than the one we like to imagine we do.