The first moments of Samuel D. Hunter’s new play, “Grangeville,” now at the Signature, take place in the pitch dark. Out of the blackness, a man’s voice—nasal, strongly Midwestern, a little plaintive—asks what seems like a silly question: “Is it late over there?” He doesn’t really get an answer. The pause crackles; we hear the glottal static of an international phone call. The response, when it finally comes, is clipped. “This bill isn’t itemized,” a different voice says.
After some time, pale light dawns on the two men talking: Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith), estranged middle-aged half brothers from tiny Grangeville, Idaho. Jerry, a down-home, aw-shucks guy, has never left Grangeville, and now, with his marriage falling apart, he’s returned to the trailer where he and his younger brother grew up in near-total abandonment. Their mother is dying, and, as various paperwork issues pile up, Jerry keeps calling, trying to reconnect with Arnold, who decades earlier fled neglect and homophobic violence for a life in the Netherlands with a kind Dutch husband, a serious art career—and an emotionally stultifying hatred for his family.
The actors, speaking to each other across a dark limbo, don’t hold cell phones or, when they shift to video calls, laptops. (The sound designer, Christopher Darbassie, subtly warps their voices so that we feel the thousands of miles between them.) The black, low-ceilinged letterbox set is by the collective called dots, and, for a long time, the only realistic touch is a ragged trailer door. Sparks stays near that door, as if Jerry’s been tethered to it.
Hunter has a genius for the distressed American landscape. He charts it by writing small, deft plays, many of them set in and named for towns in his home state of Idaho. (To list just a few: “Pocatello,” “Lewiston/Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise.”) His dramas arrive in a steady, sermon-every-Sunday rhythm, nineteen of them to date. The social and financial economies of these places are bleak. Religion often tears groups apart—though it also sometimes stitches individuals back together—and parents and children might barely know one another: in “A Bright New Boise,” a man gets a job at a big-box store to be close to the son he hasn’t met; in “A Case for the Existence of God,” two men lose custody of the children they love.
Hunter writes fast, which you sense in the naturalism and ease of his language, but the plays themselves move with courteous deliberation. He composed his best-known drama, “The Whale,” from 2012, while teaching expository writing at Rutgers. (It was made into a film starring Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his role as an overweight shut-in who tries to buy his daughter’s attention.) More than a decade later, there’s still an essayist’s economy in Hunter’s writing. Seemingly unstructured dialogue reveals itself, in retrospect, as a thesis statement. That first exchange in “Grangeville,” for instance, contains all the play’s subsequent argument: Jerry is constantly asking Arnold about the time—is it time to be forgiven?—and Arnold always responds by itemizing his spiritual bill.
Fraser was originally announced, with some fanfare, as Jerry, but he left the project because of “unforeseen circumstances” two months before the opening. The result is a blessing. Fraser’s celebrity might have destabilized the play’s delicate teeter-totter between well-matched actors, and it’s impossible to imagine a better Jerry than Sparks, a foxlike comic presence with a wheedling drawl. Sparks specializes in being the slippery partner in an existential double act: onstage in New York, he has been a sneaky, superb Vladimir (to a bewildered Estragon) in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”; a chaotic Jerry (to a staid Peter) in Edward Albee’s two-hander “The Zoo Story”; and a serial criminal (who might be the protagonist’s psychic projection) in Eugène Ionesco’s “The Killer.” Here he connects Hunter’s neorealist work to that catalogue of older absurdist plays about man’s division from himself.
Hunter is a master of Western miniatures, but he’s even more restrained than usual in “Grangeville”: one brother asks for connection, the other withholds it, and grace tips the balance. Happily, the director of the Signature production, Jack Serio, excels at restraint—he directed a compact “Uncle Vanya,” in 2023, in a loft where one scene was lit by a couple of candles. The character Arnold is a miniaturist, too: his early art work, and his most successful, was a series of tiny Grangeville dioramas. His husband, Bram (played soulfully by Sparks, with just a shift of accent), wonders why Arnold, who is experiencing artist’s block, won’t make a model of his mother’s trailer. Arnold refuses—he resents how well such a piece might be received. “Making fun of America, it’s the one theme in modern European art that is consistently evergreen,” he says.
One can be tempted to take “Grangeville” as autobiography: Hunter, much like Arnold, came out and then left a fundamentalist upbringing in Idaho behind. But it’s this aesthetic ambivalence that’s perhaps particularly relevant. Should Arnold keep making these perfect little portraits of Idaho? Is he making them for the right reasons? In the end, he—and Hunter—can’t resist. With a diorama, the artist’s hand can always come down into the shoebox, to move and adjust the figures inside. He can put people where he wants them, every time.
Across the Pershing Square Signature Center’s lobby and down the hall, the New Group is reviving the late Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class,” from 1977. “Curse” was the opening salvo in Shepard’s great cycle of dysfunctional-family plays of the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, which includes “Buried Child” and “True West.” It’s a little odd that this play—a record of Shepard’s flourishing talent, but never his finest work—is back so soon. The Signature itself produced a sturdy revival, in 2019, with a ferocious David Warshofsky as Weston, an alcoholic father who terrorizes his family, especially his grown son, Wesley, who learns to mimic him.
This production, which collapses in its first few instants and then drags itself painfully along for two hours and forty-five minutes, is a cautionary tale about relying on stardom. Its director, Scott Elliott, has cast Christian Slater as Weston, Calista Flockhart as Weston’s wife, Ella, and Cooper Hoffman—the son of the much missed Philip Seymour Hoffman—as the poor, traumatized Wesley. Despite their capacities on film, none of them demonstrate the stage flexibility for material this challenging, and Elliott’s directorial and design choices don’t help. (He has them deliver some of Shepard’s weightier language directly to the audience, and, in what’s meant to be the squalor of a failing avocado farm’s kitchen, characters often turn up in pristine, off-the-rack clothes.) Since their environment lacks reality, the actors freeze (Flockhart), turn glumly inward (Hoffman), or mime their way through things. If Weston is tired, Slater rubs his face. When Weston’s hungry, Slater rubs his stomach. Tonally, too, Elliott exerts no control. Wesley brings a sick “lamb” onstage, but the lamb is played by a full-sized ewe so immaculately fluffy and confidently vocal that she keeps the audience chuckling in admiration. (Her name is Lois, and she is a diva!)
There’s something to learn here, though. Watching the two plays back to back made me realize that Sam Hunter is, in many ways, our contemporary Sam Shepard: both use self-portraiture to represent the ruptures between generations; both draw on their small-town, Western backgrounds; both argue that men must abandon ruinous models of masculinity. Their differences in scope and tone stem from Shepard’s epic sensibility—he steered his work toward tragic, almost Wagnerian conclusions. Hunter, on the other hand, keeps his gaze locked on the near-at-hand, and, defiantly optimistic, offers the possibility of repair. Almost fifty years apart, the playwrights look out at the West and assess the toll of life in a predatory America. At the Pershing Square complex, we can see our national obsession with family inheritance being worked out side by side, theatre by theatre, man by man. ♦
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