The script to Samuel L. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a beautifully personal play at Steppenwolf Theatre from one of the theater’s leading chroniclers of the emotionally blocked American, describes the one and only location in the play as “a couch in a void.”
Remarkable what the set designer Scott Pask did with just that.
The couch is a Barcalounger-type that allows Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) to put up her feet at the end of her shifts as a nurse and her depressed nephew Ethan (Micah Stock), returning post-MFA to sell his dead father’s place, to sink into its folds. The void is to some degree the state of Idaho, the big-sky setting of most all of Hunter’s plays, but really it’s the locus of deeply held pain flowing from mistakes made, opportunities not taken, love not expressed, losses compounded, morality felt, that kind of universal stuff that rears its head in most families, especially when the parenting has not been ideal. Ethan’s dad was a meth addict. Sarah was never adequately there for him, he feels, but now she is in need and he has to decide how (or if) that changes the equation.
“Little Bear Ridge Road” is a 95-minute work of modest ambition, arguably, in that it focuses on the familial relationship between aunt and nephew and on the latter’s attempts to forge a functional romantic relationship with James (John Drea), a confident young man Ethan meets online and who offers him the kind of love that flows more easily from someone who grew up with less of a struggle. “Privilege is a deficiency that will always be a part of you,” Ethan says to James (played with great subtlety by Drea). Going after privilege is virtually essential in American theater if you want to get your play produced, but it has the benefit of being true and it is also recognizable here to anyone who entered a relationship with more baggage and fewer resources than a partner.
Within the taut script of “Little Bear Ridge Road” flows many other compelling themes. Some would seem to me to be autobiographical, such as the writer returning from a progressive urban center to his Red State home, making him feel like he has not achieved anything at least in the terms of his childhood home. Hunter has spoken often about growing up gay in Idaho and the show’s dramaturg, John Baker, is the author’s husband and first reader, so it is probably reasonable to say that aspects of their relationship are found in the play. Both halves of his couple are drawn with such loving forbearance that I would be amazed if it were otherwise.
But other broad themes emerge, too: the lingering impact on families of COVID-19’s fear and isolation (the play is set between 2020 and 2022), the emotional struggles of isolated millennials, the small-town meth epidemic, the sedative offered, at a price, by TikTok, the human resistance to saying sorry and letting feuds linger across decades. All of that is in the room in director Joe Mantello’s beautifully calibrated production. Along with a couch in a void, Hunter could have added “Clorox and a mask.”
Few readers will be surprised to read that Metcalf ranges deep into a character with a throbbing heart, but a heart with so many walls around it that no one can hear its cries. So indeed she does. But I was struck here by how much Stock pushes her to go yet further. In my time I’ve watched Metcalf wipe the stage with other actors but not only does Stock hold his own here with one of the best stage artists of her generation, he brings out the best in her. Metcalf is an in-the-moment performer and if you watch her work closely (and you should), you will see how she picks up the rhythms of her co-star’s work here, often after her neck veins have started to bulge and surprise has registered on her face. Metcalf knows how to mine empathy while avoiding sentimentality and to live and breathe a woman who holds so much inside that her barking dialogue feels like air escaping out of a tied balloon.
I can’t overstate how good it is to see this star, a consummate Chicago-style actor, back in the city that made her famous because it fell in love with her honesty.
Metcalf is working here with a cast that is not going to just roll over in sycophantic support. Much of that, of course, is due to Mantello, the director of “Wicked” whose occasional boutique directing excursions to Chicago non-profits over the years have been similarly welcome. Especially as they are always the harbinger of nuanced new work.
This has been a fine spring and early summer at Steppenwolf so far, after a long, relatively fallow period. Following on from the Broadway-bound Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play “Purpose,” “Little Bear Ridge Road” will likely strike Steppenwolf audiences as a quieter affair: just a quartet of actors (Meighan Gerachis has a small role) in a void, fighting for a connection. This is far from the first play, of course, to use settling an estate as a device for family score-settling. Like the musical “Once,” it is fundamentally is about the attempt to stick a plunger into a stopped-up human being.
But we expect musicals to end happily; Hunter plays are a different beast. This often sad, sometimes funny one keeps you on the edge, never knowing what will or will not be managed by two failing humans, looking at the stars and each other and never quite knowing if the lost time is worth lamenting.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Little Bear Ridge Road” (4 stars)
When: Through Aug. 4
Where: Steppenwolf Theater Company, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Tickets: $20-$168 at 312-335-1650 and www.steppenwolf.org
