Samuel D. Hunter's Little Bear Ridge Road, directed by Joe Mantello at Botte's 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 among the Idaho hills, this vision of a dark, empty world may seem familiar. Hunter conceived much of “Little Bear Ridge Road” during the pandemic, and the show's vast silence, more than the masked actors waving disinfectant wipes, is reminiscent of that era of isolation.
It's 2020, and Ethan (Micah Stock) has returned home to sell his late father's house. Ethan certainly can't grieve; they had not spoken for years, their relationship damaged by decades of his father's drug use. But Ethan is nonetheless in a predicament: He's left with an abusive boyfriend in Seattle, and his plans to become a writer have gone nowhere. When he drives down remote Little Bear Ridge Road to see his estranged Aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), she abruptly puts him up in her guest room. Two COVID-19 then the years come and go in strange leaps and bounds, the passing months registered in the undulating stream of television shows they watch together. (Hunter describes how slippery time was during this period—infinity was measured by season finales.)
Hunter grew up in Moscow, Idaho, not far from Sarah's home. A talented realist and explorer of a particular American loneliness, he often names his plays about the alienated life after cities in his home state: “Bright New Boise,” “Lewiston” and, most recently, “Grangeville,” which premiered at Signature in February. For “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which was originally commissioned by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater and now marks Hunter's Broadway debut, he puts another pin on the map, although I can't find an actual street by that name. Perhaps this pin is just turned off map, on the border, where the remembered landscape turns into a kind of Beckettian here-but-not.
Scott Pask's set is certainly stark enough for a Samuel Beckett play: a circle of white carpet in a space of black nothingness, furnished only by a distant ceiling fan and a huge gray plastic sofa. When Sarah and Ethan sit on this convex seating system and watch TV, they look like astronauts getting ready to launch. Their existence is suspended, moonlit and gloomy, although, in their opinion, there is a beautiful night sky. “Yeah, well, we have a nice view here,” Sarah says reluctantly. Ethan's new boyfriend, James (John Drea), is, coincidentally, an astrophysicist in training, and at one point the scale of the glittering universe sends Ethan into a panic attack. “Be that as it may, the galaxy is like right there“, he says.
Hunter wrote the play specifically for Metcalf, and Sarah is an unforgettable character, a no-nonsense pepper shaker who is most irritated when she feels a surge of emotion, or worse, a need. Metcalfe rarely jokes, but is always cheerful. The play's best moments consist of her perfectly timed physical reactions, such as her rolling her eyes when she finds out James is from Coeur d'Alene, which I think does sound suspiciously quirky and French. Sarah hid her cancer diagnosis; however, she doesn't want help, which is fortunate because Ethan barely knows how to give it. Sarah couldn't save him from his dark upbringing, and now that he's in his thirties, he seems stuck in the childhood he never had. Stock opens his mouth and tugs at his sagging pants like a small child.
The play works best as a nuanced character study, but its most subtle element is Ethan's relationship with James, a strange, two-dimensional figure whose devotion becomes strange in the face of Ethan's petulance and abuse. I wondered if James's holiness represented another aspect of our lost COVID-19 years where intense relationships blossomed out of nothing. Hunter is interested in what imperfect people can offer each other, the difference between salvation and help. There's also another reckoning of the dark night of the soul implied here: Little Bear Ridge Road is Hunter's second play this year that suggests ambivalence about retrieving material from one's past. In “Grangeville,” the sculptor wants to stop creating miniatures of his hometown, even though they made him famous; in “The Little Bear Ridge Road,” Ethan says he quit writing auto fiction because “I realized I didn't like my main characters.” There is a whole world of self-doubt contained in that sentence, a fear of something deeper than even the endless sky.
In just three days during the Powerhouse: International festival (held at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, Brooklyn), Brazilian artist, writer and performer Carolina Bianchi also navigated elements of autobiography with palpable ambivalence. But The Bride and Cinderella Goodnight, a transgressive performance piece that is one of the 2023 Avignon Festival's headline productions (co-produced in Brooklyn by L'Alliance New York), addresses this tension with a searing flame of anger and despair. In performance, the line between reality and pretense is different than in conventional theater. For example, a performance artist can actually hurt herself and it can be unbearable to watch or, as I have found, even to remember.
The beginning is almost professorial. Bianchi, dressed in a white suit, strolls across the stage with a microphone, sometimes sitting at a table and consulting a stack of papers. She begins with a conversation about art in Portuguese, showing us slides of a quartet of paintings by Botticelli: The History of Nastagio degli Onesti from 1483, inspired by a plot from Boccaccio's Decameron. Nastagio, a jilted lover, is sulking in a pine forest when he witnesses a “hunt from hell” during which a knight stalks and kills a naked woman. In fact, the couple are both already dead; the chase is repeated in a kind of Sisyphean loop, eternal torture for a woman who dared to reject the knight’s love. Nastagio then holds a banquet in the forest, inviting his former lover so she can witness the “hunt” which duly terrorizes her into marrying him. In The Decameron this is considered a happy ending; Botticelli's paintings were most likely commissioned as a wedding gift.
