Laurie Metcalf bares her soul in moving Broadway…
Theater review
LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD
95 minutes, with no intermission. At the Booth Theatre, 222 W. forty fifth St.
Actress Laurie Metcalf and playwright Samuel D. Hunter are a match made in Middle America.
There are few writers who can sublimely craft, and without any condescension, highly effective tales set in flyover nation as properly as Hunter, whose searing “The Whale” was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Brendan Fraser.
And Metcalf, although a rockstar of the New York stage, still explodes with the ferocious Midwest edge she sharpened for years at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. The “Roseanne” actress is never less than nuclear.
Both artists, in the best sense, really feel like out-of-towners with a lot of punchy truths to lay on the out-of-touch.
At the Booth Theatre, Hunter and Metcalf — H&M — have finally teamed up in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” an intimate Pacific-Northwest-set drama about lonely, struggling souls that opened Thursday on Broadway.
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It’s a hard-hitting, hard-laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront — the COVID pandemic, meth habit, health insurance coverage, shift pay — into an absorbing story you allow wanting a lot more of.
About the rocky reunion of a strong-minded Idaho aunt who holes up in a distant home in the woods and her 30-something homosexual nephew, an unsuccessful author who’s come home after dropping his dad, “Little Bear” isn’t so a lot a living-room play as a Lay-Z-Boy play.
A his-and-her’s reclining sofa on a wheel of beige carpet is the only surroundings, and the estranged pair bond and spar over that most hot-button of topics: TV exhibits.
You know the fights. Was that sequence finale fairly good? Or was it the most disappointing hour of tv the world has ever skilled? “Game of Thrones,” “Lost,” “Seinfeld,” you title it.
Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock star in “Little Bear Ridge Road” on Broadway. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
That’s a more novel thought to explore than you’d suppose. The theater often does a superb job of pretending that TV is, at best, a passing fad, when it’s actually the national pastime. That’s how people join now, prefer it or not — by disconnecting.
Sarah suits Metcalf like a sofa cupholder suits a McDonald’s fountain Coke. She’s a hospital nurse whose at-home bedside method could possibly be described as: Needs work.
Her default gruffness, though, conceals depraved smarts, a knack for mischief and a eager eye for what makes people tick. The RN is a real nuisance alright, but we love her all the same. Metcalf is uproariously humorous and bruisingly trustworthy in the half. Every dart Sarah throws hits the bullseye.
Stranger — to my thoughts, admirably so — is Micah Stock’s awkward Ethan, who’s reluctantly back in a city he hoped to never step foot in again. A loner of a youthful era, it wouldn’t be shocking if the oddball labored the afternoon shift at an arcade, chuckling at his own jokes until he clocks out.
Ethan (Stock) goes to live with his Aunt Sarah (Metcalf). Photo: Julieta Cervantes
But Ethan just isn’t a wallflower either. His insecurities, typical millennial ones, manifest themselves in a big, eccentric, self-deprecating character. And expressive Stock stands up properly to Metcalf — you’ll be able to’t very properly cower next to Laurie — despite some weighty emotional outbursts not fairly ringing true.
Stock is at his best with John Drea, who makes a splendid Broadway debut as James, a compassionate grad pupil Ethan begins courting.
A stunner of a scene between the 2 that demonstrates Hunter’s piercing understanding of regular people is a meant-to-be-encouraging dialog about receiving further money from dad and mom. What’s $100,000 from a home sale? It may cowl the rent for a 12 months. The hopeful chat warps into a venomous assault that makes the viewers sweat bullets.
The play’s ending is a controversial talker. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
“Little Bear Ridge Road” spans 2020 to 2022 — bear in mind that romp of a time? — and Joe Mantello directs the motion sleekly and merely without obnoxious indicators of passing years, like faux snow or a altering wall calendar. The actors, making delicate changes in physicality and demeanor, have gotten that lined.
And then comes the ending.
Clever Hunter toys with the concept of controversial TV finales with the last moments of his play. It’s a talker, that’s for sure. People have debated the coda with me since I first noticed it at Steppenwolf more than a 12 months in the past — prefer it’s Episode 86 of “The Sopranos.”
Rather than blacking out with finite closure or a “Little Bear Ridge Road” bear hug, Hunter lands on a considerate, open-ended suggestion that Sarah and Ethan actually beloved each other all along, in their walled-up method, and the nephew will ultimately determine his life out.
In short: Don’t stop believin’.
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