‘Little Bear Ridge Road’ Review

The script for Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” indicates that the play takes place at “a couch in a void.” As the lights come up, we see it — a white leather monstrosity with separate recliners built in — and we see, too, the void. The stage is utterly bare otherwise.

The play takes ample metaphorical advantage of both couch and void. In staging the collision of a reluctant aunt (Laurie Metcalf) and her stymied-by-life nephew (Micah Stock) during the early days of COVID, Hunter’s script situates itself within a historical moment when couch-sitting was all many people had. As for the void? Well, those familiar with Hunter’s past work (which includes “The Whale,” which Hunter later adapted for the screen, and “A Bright New Boise”) will not be surprised that Stock’s Ethan is a man more at home with words than with other people, desperate to break out of the American interior but unsure of how to do so. All he sees around him is inky darkness.

Ethan has shown up at his aunt’s doorstep at a loss: His father has died, and Ethan is obliged to sell his home and do the administrative tasks that come with grief. Not that Ethan is grieving, exactly — he and Aunt Sarah seem to agree that nothing of value was lost when Ethan’s dad, a drug addict, passed, but now Sarah and Ethan are the last two of the Fernsby family left. Both remaining Fernsbys have seen better days: Ethan’s attempt to establish himself in Seattle has come to an embarrassing end, while Sarah has consciously retreated further into her corner of Idaho, living a half-hour from the closest grocery store and tethered to the world around her only by a reality TV habit. Ethan is self-conscious, but Sarah is, at least, no homophobe; she’s stunned, in fact, to learn Ethan feared that she might be. “All this time you’ve thought I had an issue with you being gay?” she asks. “That’s the most interesting thing about you.”

Another actor might play a moment of regret after uttering this, but Metcalf, as directed by Joe Mantello, is all momentum, in conversation and otherwise. She strides around the couch, supporting her lower back with her right hand, as if, in moving it, she might come apart altogether. She, unlike her dissatisfied nephew, doesn’t see herself as having that luxury.

It’s a sharp contrast in personality types, and, perhaps, in generations: Stoicism and angst, sharing the couch together. And Sarah and Ethan’s gradual coming into an understanding of one another, and toward a time when they can speak openly about missed opportunities for connection in the past, makes for moving viewing; I was reminded, in stretches, of Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” mounted last year on Broadway and similarly concerned with two unlikely living companions trying to come to terms with one another. But there are elements here that don’t quite gel. Hunter, in writing a protagonist not dissimilar from ones he has written in the past, uses at first a sort of shorthand — Ethan is unhappy because, well, what’s to be happy about? — but as details of Ethan’s life accrue, elements (including and especially his life in Seattle) strain credulity. Ethan is, we are told, dreaming of becoming a writer, and yet his mien never struck this viewer as particularly writerly or reflective: Stock gives a performance that is emphatic to a fault. Every word he utters is capitalized.

Metcalf fares better; the play was commissioned for her as a way to return to Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company last year, and one imagines Hunter envisioning “a Laurie Metcalf type” as he wrote. (Stock was in that Chicago production, too, for what it’s worth.) Sarah exists on a continuum with all the great Metcalf characters, from the plainspoken aunt (once again!) on “Roseanne” to Lady Bird’s mother to the recent run of women she’s played on Broadway, wounded but trying to conceal the hurt behind a certain bravado. (Nora in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” comes to mind. So does the defeated politician in “Hillary and Clinton.”) 

Moments of big emotion in “Little Bear Ridge Road” don’t fall flat, exactly, but they don’t play to Hunter’s strengths as a writer; he’s better in small, askew gestures. We learn a piece of information about Sarah offhandedly, while Ethan is talking about his family situation on a date with nice-guy grad student James (John Drea), and the power of that news dawning on the audience outweighs the excoriations Ethan delivers about his upbringing.

The show is at its best when allowing Ethan and Sarah’s relationship to unfold without forcing the revelations. (Lead producer Scott Rudin, returning to the industry after a four-year hiatus following reports of an alleged pattern of bullying subordinates, can at least be said to have long had an eye for the truly literary, which this show at its best achieves; perhaps, too, a story about trying to make possible past misdeeds right had its appeals.) The pair’s misunderstandings at first, before a torrent of discussion over what Sarah might have done differently to protect her nephew, may be relatively small beer, but I found myself more interested in little nuances of the ways aunt and nephew differed than in cosmic questions of what is owed to a family member. After all, the first informs the second in ways that are intellectually satisfying to dig into; the latter lends itself to grandiosity.

One of the show’s best moments, to wit, comes in a conversation between the two housemates over what they like to watch on TV. Ethan loves antihero dramas in the post-”Sopranos” vein, and I cued myself to roll my eyes at industry satire that would likely be far from subtle. But what happened next was a strange, sad little moment. Sarah declares, “Just because it’s so complicated that you have to watch an episode recap every week doesn’t mean it’s better. Real people aren’t always desperately doing things.”

It starts out like a groaner that could have been said anytime this century. But it ends up as a statement of purpose — and one that, in the show’s louder moments, I wish Hunter had taken more thoroughly to heart. Sarah’s from the same family as Ethan, has seen the same troubles, and lives a life of similar isolation and lack of fulfillment, and yet, what can she do? Hand at her back, she just keeps moving along. She struggles to express love, but — in one of the many small moments of poignancy studded through “Little Bear Ridge Road,” and distinguishes it as a meaningful achievement — she refuses to make a display of herself. She can’t quite say she loves her nephew, but she can do the next best thing. Sarah has no interest in what Ethan has on the TV set, but she says her piece about it, and then, seated next to him in the void, keeps watching with him.