You can’t see Lori Metcalfe on Little Bear Ridge Road

I usually carry a notebook with me to write in the dark during the play, and even if my notes are almost illegible, they at least help me retain a sensory memory of something I feel is important. About a third of the way Little Bear Ridge RoadI realized I was just writing words and phrases that Laurie Metcalf hit out of the park: “Do you need a top paper!?” “It is Protestantism“,” “Home Box Office”, “Bandsaw”. Metcalfe is one of America’s great stage stars, and is also the winner and nominee of a large number of Emmys. (to remember this?) Give her a nice slow pitch of line over home plate, and she’ll straighten her shoulders and hit it with such force you can hear the ash hitting the skin. Her style is muscular and energetic — that of Steppenwolf, the company of which she was a founding member — and she feels the need to provide sound effects while describing what she’s doing. “All this time you thought I had a problem with you Gay?“(Ka ping!), she tells her nephew, played by Micah Stock, who has moved into her home in Idaho with her while he sortes out his dead father’s affairs. “That’s the most interesting thing about you” (Strike, prisoner!).

in Little Bear Ridge RoadMetcalf pulls off his hits with ease, although the production feels more like watching a home derby than a full match. I couldn’t escape the disturbing feeling, when I was watching Samuel D.’s drama. Hunter unfolds, that the circumstances were all too perfectly aligned to showcase Metcalfe, that they are so well-suited to her skills — that there are diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best. Is it wrong to wish for more uncertainty, more risk, and another team on the field? Metcalf and her manager and frequent collaborator Joe Mantello Commissioned This play is written by Samuel D. Hunter, whose work leans toward exquisite miniatures of his home state of Idaho, often with romantically desperate gay men in its midst. (The play’s producer, Scott Rudin, who left Broadway in 2020 amid accusations of excessive bullying, has zeroed in on this play as the perfect vehicle for his theatrical comeback.) Here, Hunter returns to a familiar character in Ethan Stock, a writer who moves out of a small Idaho town for college and then life in Seattle, but whose career is flagging and his bank account is draining. Stock is a little overwhelmed by Metcalfe’s firepower on stage – and who wouldn’t be? – Although he grew into the role well over the course of the evening, combining an imposing physical presence with lively defence. He’s an adult who has spent so much time emphasizing his teddy bear qualities that he doesn’t know how to get out of the act. After the death of his addict father, Ethan returns to see if there is any money to be made selling his house, intending to stay only briefly with his Aunt Sarah, Metcalfe’s character, a Brunhilde from the highlands. She values ​​her independence, proudly declares that her truck can hit a deer without leaving much impact on the vehicle, and spends most of the play attacking her bosses at her nursing job or watching trashy TV shows she insists she hates. The two are unsure of each other from the beginning. Ethan is initially concerned that Sarah is homophobic, but the tension has to do with his deep feelings of betrayal over the way she acted during his childhood, and the open wounds left from his father’s addiction.

Hunter has given himself a pretty good amount of emotional and physical space to work from, and there’s a joy to be had in watching Metcalfe and Stock negotiate the way Sarah and Ethan approach each other. Scott Pask’s collection consists of only a folding sofa on a circular platform – “a sofa in the void,” as the text says – which evokes the surface of the moon, or the face of a stopped clock. The two often chat about each other, avoiding a plethora of painful topics while watching television, indicated by the blue glow in Heather Gilbert’s lighting that emanates from the direction of the audience, as if we were all sitting behind the screen. Hunter has He said that, in addition to writing specifically for Metcalfe, he “wanted to write a play about people who watch television.” Little Bear Ridge Road It embodies many of the strange emotional lines of overindulging the series with someone you can’t connect with emotionally. (The play, set during the pandemic, is a time capsule.) Sarah and Ethan won’t address their family history, but they will talk to each other about the twists and turns in their favorite drama. Hunter has a lot of rich material to work with, since staring at a screen is the act that takes up most of our days, and then there’s the added resonance that Metcalfe herself has, given her past years Roseannethus associated Which sofa. in Little Bear Ridge RoadIts best moment is when screen and life come together: Sarah, helping Ethan sort through the junk at his father’s house, describes something she saw on an old TV show, a moment in which a man is wandering around the house and suddenly sees a giant hole in his living room (it looks like David Lynch, and… mad men via Los Angeles Law). As Sarah describes it, and Metcalfe plays it, television becomes life. I was suddenly in the living room with that hole too. What we have absorbed through popular culture is as much a wound in our epigenetic memory as anything else.

But Hunter doesn’t push any further. In my favorite works of his, such as The issue of the existence of God and Bright new boise— a play that has its own surreal dynamic with the television screens, projecting images of hell in the middle of a department store — Hunter locates an unnerving ambiguity among the atoms of hyperreality. But I worry about Hunter, whose work is less and older Pisces It became a successful film, and since its release it has shifted towards a more careful rather than sensationalized and diverse self-awareness. I felt it dead Grangevillewhich featured an Idaho miniature artist concerned about the packaging of his work creeping into the film Little Bear Ridge Roadwhich doesn’t ooze mystery so much as it delivers some stern “grow up, turn off your phone” life lessons for Ethan. I think Sarah might be happy to have her way. And while I’m glad to see some media snobbery, Ethan and Sarah’s interaction with television has become a regular occurrence – their favorite show, Extraterrestrialreveals itself to be a baggage of sci-fi clichés, even though it never feels like the real thing that could be broadcast anywhere. It is an endless network drama like lost? A distorted Netflix original? Apple TV+ account crap? Drill on the boob tube as you wish, but drill precisely. This way of looking at screen culture from an imprecise distance, which also shows up in a scolding scene where Ethan is aimlessly scrolling through something like TikTok, is exasperating in a play that is otherwise very precise in relation to its actual time and place. You are free to Google Exact location On the real Little Bear Ridge Road, for example, outside of Troy, Idaho.

Hunter also goes so far as to link the play’s interest in the act of watching television with stargazing. This occupies (as long as we think in television terms) a B-plot in which Ethan ends up flirting with a local astrophysicist played by John Dre. (They meet via an app, though you’ll understand the characters’ expectations better if you specify whether it’s more like Tinder or like Sniffies.) Their budding romance has echoes of Hunter’s other plays — there’s a fight over money that’s very similar to the one in Hunter’s play. clarkstonThe feeling of a tense relationship due to the stagnation of one of the partners, A no Grangeville– However, I found it difficult to contact him. Stock and Drea are charming together, and their flirtation in Mantello’s direction feels like a cozy webcomic, but you keep waiting for Hunter to immerse the characters in something deeper than just fighting about leaving town to get a Ph.D. Program or ruminate about how looking up at the night sky makes you feel small. Mostly, you’re just waiting for Laurie Metcalfe to return to the stage.

Little Bear Ridge Road Located in the Booth Theater.