Theater review by Adam Feldman
What makes Samuel D. Hunter's work so consistently beautiful is his ability to capture big things in small forms without being reductive. His plays—which have included The Whale, The Harvest and Greater Clements—are like ships in a bottle: exquisitely crafted and detailed depictions of life in rural Idaho that explore recurring themes (physical and financial limitations, queer identity, crises of family and faith) with endless variety and sympathy. His latest work, Grangeville, is very much in that tradition, and Hunter gatherers won't want to miss it.
Hunter's last drama at the Signature Theatre, A Case for the Existence of God, won the 2022 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Like that show, Grangeville—whose world premiere at the Signature is sensitively directed by Jack Serio—has only two actors. Brian J. Smith is Arnold, a gay visual artist who has fled Idaho to live in the Netherlands, and Paul Sparks is Jerry, his older half-brother and former bully, who reaches out when their mother is on her deathbed. For most of the play, their interactions are long-distance, via phone or computer, and their mutual estrangement intially finds them completely in the dark. But as their lines of communication open, the production's lighting (by Stacy Derosier) gradually reveals more of its set (by the design collective dots): brutalist black walls that evoke volcanic rock, the hardened vestige of former heat.
Sparks is superb as Jerry, deeply stuck in his hometown roots but existentially adrift and ill-equipped to process his feelings, and Smith gives a layered turn as Arnold, whose outward defensiveness bespeaks a fear that he doesn't have much of an inside to defend. (The artistic self-image around which he has built his identity might exceed his artistic ability.) Both actors briefly play other characters—Sparks is highly effective as Arnold's Dutch husband, Smith somewhat less so as Jerry's soon-to-be-ex-wife—but Grangeville is about the half-bonds of brotherhood, or the bonds of half-brotherhood, and they render that dynamic with touching delicacy: the back and forth of two damaged people for whom reconciliation may or may not be in the cards.
Grangeville. Signature Theatre (Off Broadway). By Samuel D. Hunter. Directed by Jack Serio. With Paul Sparks, Brian J. Smith. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
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Grangeville | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
