Aliens in Idaho
- Jonathan Kalb
- 3 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Watching Samuel D. Hunter’s Broadway debut, Little Bear Ridge Road, which was first staged last year at Steppenwolf, I found myself reflecting on how complicated it must be to be effectively branded America’s national poet of heartland bleakness. This has been Hunter’s inevitable lot, at least since the film of The Whale won an Oscar in 2023.
I’ve never been to Idaho, but I kinda feel like I have from the half-dozen plays of his I’ve seen. I’m an urban creature who’s surely typical of the relatively worldly, coastal fan base this Julliard-educated author has cultivated with his luminous and touching plays like The Whale, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, and A Case for the Existence of God, These have all been quietly transcendent stories of lonely, isolated and marginalized Idahoans trying to reconnect with alienated friends, family members and partners. They’re consistently vivid, perceptive, drily funny, and nourishing, never merely depressing, and that has felt every time like a small, renewing miracle.
Little Bear Ridge Road, lucidly directed by Joe Mantello, is every bit as strong and sensitive as Hunter’s other work, but in one way it’s distinct. It was written for a TV star, Laurie Metcalf, whose lead character was built around her trademark repertoire of bristly, hair-trigger irritability, famously sharpened to a brash comic edge over nine seasons of Roseanne. There are obvious advantages to this, as Metcalf is a dynamo with crack comic timing, but there’s also risk. The risk is that her broader-than-usual comedy makes some feel that Hunter’s compassionate observational eye has now tipped into urbane condescension.
The setting here is as spare as it gets: a couch. Just a jumbo beige couch, on a Broadway stage, surrounded by emptiness (design by Scott Pask). The time is the 2020 Covid lockdown, and the couch’s owner is Sarah (Metcalf), a defiantly self-reliant nurse who drives a big truck, has contempt for her corner-cutting employer, and, since her divorce, has moved to the sticks to avoid people. As the play opens, she’s visited by her nephew Ethan (Micah Stock), who has come from Seattle to sell his recently deceased father’s house. Sarah points out she could have easily done this for him—it was her brother, after all, and she has the deed. Five minutes in and we fully understand the couch as a figure for behemoth alienation.
The first scene is a wonderfully awkward dance of unacknowledged desire and avoidance. Ethan has all his worldly stuff in his car and clearly needs a landing place but doesn’t want to say that. Sarah clearly wants him to stay but it goes against her ornery front to say that. Instead of hugs, she tosses out brassy tokens of half-welcome that Metcalf lands as comic zingers. “Are you hungry? . . . Hopefully not. I don’t have any food.” “You need a top sheet?! . . . No . . . Good because I don’t have one.” And then also this: “All this time you thought I had an issue with you being gay? That's the most interesting thing about you.”
It’s no easy challenge playing opposite Metcalf because her punchy ferocity can be overwhelming. Micah Stock gives a master clinic here in how it’s done. He plays Ethan as a study in ambivalent withholding, filling the void of open affection Metcalf creates with a sort of brittle stoicism that forces her, eventually, to come to him. This happens gradually and haltingly, sometimes in scenes where it seems nothing much is happening, like when they watch a dumb TV show about aliens together. The heart of the play becomes the story of how these palpably damaged, socially dysfunctional people beat a grudging path to caring about one another.
In time we learn that Ethan’s writing career stalled after his MFA and he has fled a bad relationship with a coke-head lawyer in Seattle. His father was a neglectful meth-head he’d long lost touch with (“He called me three or four years ago asking for forty bucks. When I didn’t give it to him he called me a faggot, so. That was that.”) and he has arrived to find the dad's house a ramshackle rattrap mired in debt. On top of this, he blames Sarah for not rescuing him as a boy from his father’s abuse.
Sarah, recognizing these trust issues, reveals that she wanted kids of her own and endured four miscarriages. By the time the action leaps to 2022 and we see Sarah being treated for cancer, the comic zingers have all but stopped, replaced now by reserved appreciation.
A major factor in driving the change between them is a third character, James—a guy Ethan meets for what he thinks is a quick hookup who becomes a steady boyfriend. James, played with sweet intelligence by John Drea, is a grad student in astrophysics who comes from a well-off family and is so emotionally secure that his solidity scares Ethan. To say too much about how this fear sparks a crisis in both relationships would be a needless spoiler.
Suffice it to say that the way things do and don’t work out is unquestionably worth seeing. Little Bear Ridge Road is one of the best new plays I’ve seen this year, and it’s on a limited run, closing February 15.
By Samuel D. Hunter
Directed by Joe Mantello
Booth Theatre