You would think Samuel D. Hunter would run out of ideas. Every one of his plays takes place in his native Idaho and usually features a gay man struggling with loneliness and finding his identity in a straight-dominated world. Yet all of his works I’ve seen Off-Broadway including The Whale, Pocatello, Greater Clements, A Case for the Existence of God, and Grangeville are uniquely individual and heartfelt. So it is with his Broadway debut, Little Bear Ridge Road at the Booth Theater after a successful run at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. We’re back in rural Idaho and the hero is an alienated, troubled gay young man, but his journey is specific to this compassionate, funny, tender piece.
Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in
Little Bear Ridge Road.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
Joe Mantello masterfully and subtly directs Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in two outstanding, compassionate performances in one of the best plays of the Broadway season so far. Scott Pask’s minimal setting accurately fulfills the description in the program: “A couch in a void.” We are in the home of Sarah (the magnificently curmudgeonly Metcalf), a cranky nurse on the titular isolated country road. She is reluctantly welcoming her estranged nephew Ethan (awkward and desolate Stock) after the death of Ethan’s father (her brother) so that the estate may be settled. Sarah and Ethan have both been damaged by life and are wary of each other. Sarah had a series of miscarriages and her partner Tony left her years ago and she is undergoing chemotherapy for rapidly advancing cancer. Ethan was rejected by his homophobic father, a meth addict, and he’s still recovering from a bad breakup in Seattle and his failed ambition to become a writer. Their shaky, tentative connection forms the action of the play as the two navigate the emotional minefield that lies between them.
They’re also the last two members of the family whose roots stretch back to pioneer days. This is another common theme in Hunter’s work—contemporary characters lost and alone in the 21st century after a long family history of independence and living the American dream. “I hate this country,” cries Ethan after a frustrating phone call with the medical insurance bureaucracy. “It hates you right back,” Sarah sharply replies.
Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in
Little Bear Ridge Road.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
The two leads skillfully circle each other like wary wrestlers, afraid to engage, but ready to battle if necessary. Their early encounters are like opening salvos in a potential face-off. They don’t want to fight, but they don’t want to give themselves away emotionally either. Their lines are dripping with sarcasm as they offer condolences on their mutual loss. It’s no surprise Metcalf is so wonderfully acid, given her spiky characterization of Jackie, the wacky sister on Roseanne and The Conners sitcoms. She can make vacuuming into an act of aggression and an offer of coffee into a missile attack. “It’s already MADE!,” she angrily cries as if to say, “Don’t think I’m being nice. I didn’t go to the trouble just for you, so don’t get any ideas.” When she reveals her anger over her cancer diagnosis and the condescension from her medical colleagues, she reveals Sarah’s scarred pride and fury over her lack of control.
Stock emerges here as a major acting talent. His Ethan is a walking wound, barely managing to struggle from day to day after his life has been shattered. We see him tentatively attempt a new relationship with James, a sweet grad student in astrophysics (sympathetic John Drea), and then retreat into his own insecurities. “I don’t know how to be a person in this terrible f******g nightmarish world,” he achingly cries and we feel the devastating impact of Ethan’s dysfunctional childhood and rudderless maturity.
Hunter does not neatly tie up the frustratingly loose ends of Sarah and Ethan’s stories. Many are left dangling, but along the path we see that they bond in many ways, most bizarrely over a sci-fi TV show which plays an unexpectedly important part in the play’s resolution, delivered simply and directly by Meighan Gerachis as Sarah’s nurse. 
Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in
Little Bear Ridge Road.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
As noted, Montello stages the play with a light, almost invisible hand. His cast gets their laughs and delivers the emotional knockout blows. Pask’s set, illuminated and transformed by Heather Gilbert’s versatile lighting, is like a modern American version of a Beckett landscape, a Lazy-Boy couch in a black void indeed, emphasizing the piercing loneliness of Hunter’s questing Idahoans.
Oct. 30—Feb. 15, 2026. Booth Theater, 222 W. 45th St., NYC. Running time: 90 mins. with no intermission. telecharge.com.
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