The Rundown
Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company brings out the heavy hitters for the world premiere of Little Bear Ridge Road by Samuel D. Hunter. The MacArthur Fellow, known for penning the screenplay of his play, The Whale, nabbed comeback-kid star Brendan Fraser a Best Actor Academy Award.
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Director Joe Mantello (Wicked on Broadway, FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans) tackles the play about two estranged family members thrown back together in the wake of a family tragedy, and true to form, Tony and Emmy winner Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne, The Connors) leaves no emotional stone unturned.
No Tea, No Shade
Just outside Moscow (Idaho, not Russia), the headstones of the Fernsbys dominate the local cemetery. In 2020, only two family members remain: crotchety nurse Sarah (Metcalf) and her gay nephew Ethan (Micah Stock), a frustrated writer-turned-bookstore-clerk who’s reluctantly returned from Seattle to get his late father Leon’s affairs in order. Ethan feels no love for his father, who finally succumbed to a decades-long meth addiction, but COVID lockdown is in place, and Sarah’s offered her couch. As time passes and Ethan starts dating a local astrophysicist (John Drea), Ethan questions why he’s still in Idaho — and what the aunt who kept her distance during his traumatic childhood has come to mean to him.
In typical Hunter fashion, Little Bear Ridge Road’s dialogue ranges from laugh-out-loud hilarious to emotionally devastating simplicity. The playwright excels at probing the minds and hearts of those who grow pumpkins and frequent Wal-Mart, questioning their place in a world that feels incomprehensibly vast and all too infinitesimal in one breath and gruffly offering their nephew’s new boyfriend coffee in the next. In a society that seems to decline by the microsecond, Hunter says, human connection is all we have, whether that’s manifested through deep conversations about mortality or passionate exchanges concerning a TV series about aliens.
Mantello’s staging gives Steppenwolf’s mainstage space both the intimate feel of an Idaho living room and the wide-open aura of a star-laden sky. Stock radiates pure honesty as Ethan progresses from a closed-off urbanite to an openly vulnerable millennial who wonders how to be a person in an increasingly broken world. And Metcalf’s performance is a tour de force. Her Sarah, clad in zip-up vests and patterned socks, who never bought a telescope “because then, I’d have a telescope,” who Dustbusts at 6:30 a.m. while FaceTiming a friend, and who wants no special attention or affection whatsoever until she does, had me silently saying over and over, “I know her.”
Let’s Have a Moment
Little Bear Ridge Road’s solitary piece of furniture, a beige recliner leather couch with a center section that converts into a makeshift table, becomes the play’s central playing area. In one scene, Sarah and Ethan settle in — a plastic bag containing Pringles on the floor next to Ethan’s kicked-off shoes. As they banter over an episode of their favorite alien show, each takes turns reclining and sitting back up in their respective seats, Styrofoam soda cups in the holders between them. While their dialogue entertains, it’s almost superficial compared to the comfortable choreography of cupholders, footrests, and whirring adjustable seats that say without words: we are family, and this is home.
The Last Word
From the beleaguered Olive Garden staff of his play Pocatello to the long-haul trucker community of The Few, Samuel D. Hunter excels at crafting narratives that center—in the words of my mom and guest at the performance — “the people no one writes plays about.” With its jaded, aging nurse and misanthropic gay writer asking the big and small questions in the middle of nowhere and a world on fire, with dark humor and the deepest of pathos, Little Bear Ridge Road is Hunter at his rawest, realest, and finest.
Little Bear Ridge Road plays at Chicago’s Steppenwolf’s Downstairs Theater through August 4.
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