Review: Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville Asks, What Makes a Family?

Half-brothers Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) haven’t spoken in years, but their mother’s mounting medical bills force Jerry to make the call. We instantly feel the icy gulf between them in Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville, now making its world premiere at Signature Theatre. A heart-wrenching and beautifully crafted two-hander, it ranks with Hunter’s best work.

Jerry has stayed in Grangeville, their small Idaho hometown. In fact, he’s currently living in the trailer where they grew up, ostensibly to care for mom, but really because his wife, Stacey, wants a divorce and he has nowhere else to go. Ten years younger, Arnold lives thousands of miles away in Rotterdam with his partner Bram. An artist best known for his dioramas of his hometown, he got out of Grangeville as soon as he could—and both brothers know why.

Arnold still resents Jerry for being his tormenter, rather than his protector. “I was just trying to toughen him up,” Jerry lamely says to justify his cruelty. But hasn’t Arnold gotten the better end of the deal, running off to glamorous Europe while Jerry contends with a dying mother and failing marriage? Sparks radiates the exasperation of a straight American man who has done everything he was taught to do, only to find that the world has moved on.

“I’m not responsible for your shitty life decisions,” Arnold seethes. And really, in an age when you can choose your job, your home, every item in that home, and even your family, what is the purpose of blood relations? Why should Arnold help Jerry at all?

Few playwrights are better equipped to answer that question and grapple with the consumerist hubris undergirding it. Hunter has been a dogged chronicler of the emotional impact of liberal dynamism, a force that has brought spectacular wealth to urban centers like New York City, but devastation to the small Idaho towns that are the namesakes of Hunter’s plays. Simultaneously, it has facilitated unprecedented liberation for sexual minorities like Arnold (and me). But as with all things in the free market, there is a price, and it is taking a toll on Arnold.

Smith is riveting as a gay man who has escaped the prison of smalltown life only to find himself in a new cell. When Bram suggests he create a diorama of his mom’s trailer, he responds, “The sad thing is that diorama would probably bring in more money than anything I’ve made in the last ten years. Making fun of America, it’s the one theme in modern European art that is consistently evergreen.” He thought he was just showing people where he grew up, but he’s come to realize that he was crafting a series of twee affirmations for his audience—allowing them to tut-tut at the vulgar way the citizens of the hegemon live while luxuriating in their own sophistication. It’s as satisfying a consumer experience as stepping past the velvet rope at Gucci.

Looking uncannily like the playwright, Smith wears mom jeans and a fuzzy oversized gray shirt seemingly meant to telegraph to a tribe of Euro-artsy types that he doesn’t care what he looks like, and he’s spent a lot of money to do it. Similarly, Sparks wears a baseball cap and utility vest, as if he’s always prepared to suddenly go duck hunting. Those costumes, perfectly designed by Ricky Reynoso, don’t change later in the play, when Smith takes on the role of Stacey and Sparks (giving us whiplash with his transition from an Idaho twang to a restrained Dutch accent) plays Bram. The performers easily communicate that we are seeing new characters, yet something about the original roles remain, suggesting that the dynamics of our earliest relationships, the humans from whom we learn to become human, always linger into our adult lives.

Those little touches pop without ever overpowering the canvas in director Jack Serio’s production, which achieves a remarkable level of intimacy for a play in which the two characters spend the first three quarters of the script only speaking over the phone (Christopher Darbassie’s sound design will give you ASMR chills). The simple scenic design, by dots, depicts the vast ocean separating the brothers with blue stucco, and later conjures Arnold’s dioramas with a breathtaking reveal. Lighting designer Stacey Derosier expands and contracts the space, which at times feels like a cold and forbidding cavern, but other times wraps up in its incandescent embrace. It’s a beautiful first vision of a play that feels elastic enough to be reimagined a thousand different ways.

And I suspect it will, because the questions driving Grangeville will only become more pressing in the coming years: In a complex free society, what is the place of biological family? What do we owe to the people with whom we share DNA? And when the tide of modernity goes out, who but our families will be there to grab hold of us and pull us back to shore?