ajhlovestheatre

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD

by Samuel D Hunter

directed by Joe Mantello

Booth Theatre, New York City – until 21 December 2025

running time: 90 minutes no interval 

https://littlebearridgeroad.com

Do we choose to engage with an increasingly difficult world or do we hide away from it? What is the cost of being there for other people even in extremely tricky circumstances, even when they claim not to need help, and at what point does one close the door to protect one’s own interests? These are some of the questions running through Samuel D Hunter’s deceptively simple but altogether engrossing new play, Little Bear Ridge Road, now on Broadway in a Joe Mantello-helmed production that originated at Chicago’s powerhouse of stage excellence, Steppenwolf Theatre.

This is Hunter’s Broadway debut (his Clarkston, a tenderly written but inferior work, is just completing a West End run) and it’s an unqualified triumph. This is one of those plays that American writers seem to excel at: terse, pared down, spiky but complex, a beating, bruised heart under a harsh, unadorned exterior, the only thing maximalist about Mantello’s exquisite staging is the craft and talent on display.

Set in rural Idaho in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, the play sees thirty-something Ethan (Micah Stock, raising gruff awkwardness to an art form) arriving in the remote farmhouse of his tough, bemused aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf, re-staking her claim as America’s greatest living stage actress), ostensibly to sell the nearby house of his newly deceased drug addict father. It becomes clear pretty quickly that there’s more to Ethan’s intentions than that, and also that Sarah is less invulnerable than she first appears.

Two stones rubbed together can create fire, and so it proves when Stock’s mercurial dreamer clashes with Metcalf’s flinty Sarah. Ethan is a mass of contradictions and resentments while Sarah, who is being callously managed out of her job in a local hospital, just wants to be left alone. She’s perhaps naive about how dreadful life for her nephew had been as a kid, and he never forgave her for not responding the way he expected when his ten year old self reached out, and their uneasy co-existence, full of barely expressed feelings and fuelled by shared critiques of trash television, is realised with a rare truth and economy. 

It’s grimly funny too: after a fruitless phone conversation with a medical insurance company, Ethan moans “I hate this country!” and Sarah comes right back with “trust me, it hates you more”. Ethan looks like having a real chance of happiness with good-hearted rich kid James (Steppenwolf regular John Drea, in a sublime Broadway bow) who he met online, and the first meeting between James and Sarah – he has stayed the night which she is unaware of – is a little masterpiece of comic social awkwardness and blind panic.

It’s the sadder, darker territories that the play enters which really linger in the mind though. Metcalf charts Sarah’s physical decline due to cancer with a detail and honesty that’s simultaneously riveting and hard to watch. Stock never overplays Ethan’s essential unhappiness and past trauma but when it all boils up in a howl of despair (“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE A PERSON IN THIS TERRIBLE FUCKING NIGHTMARISH WORLD”) he is utterly devastating. Not a single line, gesture or movement is wasted, everything counts.

Metcalf is thrilling, an artist at the very top of her game, entirely without vanity or artifice. She conveys every layer of this difficult but not unkind woman, and disappears so completely into her it’s almost hard to fathom that one is watching acting. The queen of the withering stare, Metcalf also invests Sarah with some choice comic physical touches: note the way she wryly genuflects when taking leave of the two boyfriends. Hunter has written Sarah to possess a defensive dry wit which Metcalf attacks with laconic aplomb; the whole performance really is the most flawless marriage between actor and material.

 A lesser talent might pale into insignificance next to Metcalf’s brilliance but Stock matches her. He makes no attempt to ingratiate Ethan to us but allows his tricky nature and hypersensitivity to speak for themselves, creating a figure that is at once sympathetic and frustrating; it’s a quirky but endlessly interesting interpretation, rooted in truth and real human frailties, and there are strong indications that Ethan’s writing talent is a genuine one. Drea is an understated wonder, and it’s a sign of the quality of the production that even Meghan Gerachis, another Steppenwolf alumna, who only has one brief scene as a nurse, is utter perfection.

Scott Pask’s solitary sofa atop a slate-grey disc with a fan whirling overhead is the only set but, as lit by Heather Gilbert against a black backdrop that occasionally softens into a wall of pale stone, it gives a striking sense of lonely figures adrift in an endless nightscape. Jessica Pabst’s naturalistic costumes are spot-on as is the sound design by Mikhaïl Fiksel which is so unobtrusive as to be unnoticeable, except that we hear every mutter and throwaway retort.

This is surely one of the finest American plays in decades. Tiny in stature but massive in emotional impact, it sears and haunts. I left the theatre in a state of drained rapture, fighting back tears. Little Bear Ridge Road received one of the most heartfelt standing ovations I’ve ever seen in a Broadway theatre: it absolutely deserved it.