Three brights stars illuminate ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’
By Alfred P. Doblin
The setting for Samuel D. Hunter’s debut Broadway play, Little Bear Ridge Road, is “a couch in a void.” The time is during and soon after the Covid pandemic, a period when all of us felt trapped in a timeless void, not knowing what laid ahead.
For the three characters in Troy, Idaho – and you have to appreciate a playwright who subtly invokes the name of a great ancient city under a 10-year-siege while painting a portrait of a tiny, rural Northwestern town – the void is both mystical and real.
Sarah, a misanthropic nurse, is suddenly confronted by her estranged nephew, Ethan, a non-writing, fiction writer, after his father, and her brother dies, presumably from Covid. The dead man was a meth addict and there was no love between him and Ethan. The relationship between Sarah and her dead brother is more complicated. Sarah’s relationship with her nephew is complicated, as well.
Added to the void, is James, an astrophysicist working on his Masters, who becomes Ethan’s boyfriend. There they are in the void, in a place with an expansive night sky unencumbered by light pollution. Ethan knows little about astronomy, but in a phone conversation with James, identifies “Orion’s Belt,” three bright stars – Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka – that while appearing in perfect alignment, are thousands and thousands of miles apart.
Three stars in the void. Three interconnected but distant people on a couch in Idaho. I love me a good metaphor.
And there is brilliance in this quiet place. Oh, people shout and yell, but it is a quiet play where the juxtaposition of the luminous night sky and the void below serves as a buffer to the noise, anger, and frustration of the people in between.
Laurie Metcalf is the brightest star in this Orion’s Belt. As Sarah, she is trapped in a house, a place, and a life she did not want, but in fact, she chose. That will be her wisdom to share with her nephew, brilliantly played by Micah Stock. People can leave; people can choose to leave and make something of their lives, but it requires them to take that step. James, well-played by John Drea, is the academic from a moneyed family, and the most mobile of the three.
Over the course of the lockdown and afterwards, Sarah and Ethan bond, not easily, but they bond. And as in many stormy relationships, they do better when they are not acknowledging they are doing anything – like watching a television series about extraterrestrials that concludes, not with a great ending, but the fact that the aliens were always just aliens. Sometimes extraterrestrials are just extraterrestrials; sometimes people are just people. They do what they were always going to do from the beginning of the story.
Depending on your point of view, that can be very satisfying. As to what happens to Sarah, Ethan, and James, well, that’s the story to be told and I don’t believe in spoilers, aside from this: It is a good ending. An honest ending. And ending that makes you think of what comes next.
It is hard to imagine an actor greater than Metcalf playing Sarah. She understands nuance, even when angered. There is beauty, grace, and pain in what could just be a bitter, aging woman’s last years. And Stock’s Ethan is at times both sympathetic and pathetic, someone who wants to be hugged, while needing a kick in the pants to move on with his life.
Sarah, in a disjointed moment of confused memory, describes a sitcom episode where the lead character discovers a huge void inexplicably opened-up in his living room floor. She recounts how the camera looked down into this void in the living room floor. It is a jumble of memory, but it is prescient because there is a void in her home.
Little Bear Ridge Road is a not a Covid play. It is not about the pandemic, aside from that being a device to bring three distant stars into seemingly perfect alignment. Sarah, Ethan, and James are not fighting against a virus; they are shouting into the void in a place where there is little to distract from how small any one star is in the heavens.
There is a beauty in that effort because that is all people can do, shout until they realize they are shouting at something too vast to comprehend, and then decide to not look up, but ahead, and chart their own course.
Joe Mantello’s direction is perfect for this quiet play where people shout at times. He allows his actors to coax us into their small universe in the void.
If I have only one wish for this production, it is that at the end of the play, after the height of the stark backdrop that travels up the rear of the stage has been revealed, it gave way to the brilliant Idaho night sky, with the stars of Orion’s Belt shining ever so clearly.
It is a small point. Sarah, Ethan, and James are not Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the three stars of Orion’s Belt. But as portrayed by Metcalf, Stock, and Drea, they are perfectly aligned and brilliantly lighting up the stage of the Booth Theater.
Until next time, Alfred with P