Little Bear Ridge Road Broadway Reviews

Hunter, a prolific Off Broadway playwright with an oeuvre of works set in Idaho (“A Case for the Existence of God,” “Grangeville”), is making his Broadway debut with “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which had its premiere last year at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. Its transfer declares the Broadway resurrection of the exiled-for-a-while producer Scott Rudin. (Allegations of bullying in 2021 led to widespread denunciations.) And honestly? Everything about this impeccable production, presented by Rudin and the media mogul Barry Diller, exudes the nearly flawless taste that Rudin is famous for.

This isn’t conveyed sentimentally, but gently. And it is there right in front of us, in scenes—sprouting from James’ professional pursuit—that major on the composition and meanings of space and the universe. Observe the set itself: the black background, clunkily big couch, and the crucible of carpet containing the play’s frustrating, frustrated, yet winning characters. This imagined room, this stage, is its own modest planet, everyday and also otherworldly, spinning away from us but also right there: fixed, meaningful, and shining bright.

Mr. Hunter’s writing has a clarity, delicacy and crisp simplicity that allows us to watch as Sarah and Ethan negotiate the minefields of their relationship, drawing comfort from one another’s company even though both would be loath to admit it. Under the astutely unfussy direction of Joe Mantello, Ms. Metcalf’s remarkably fine performance is flinty, funny and savagely unsentimental. And Mr. Stock’s Micah is sensitive to the point of seeming to squirm inside a constricted, wounded soul.

Commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where it premiered under Joe Mantello‘s exacting direction, the production brings the reliably brilliant Laurie Metcalf back to Broadway in a role that dovetails neatly with her strengths. Playing Sarah, a flinty nurse involuntarily nearing retirement and living in Northern Idaho as far from other people as she can get, Metcalf exercises her usual peerless comic timing, tossing off line readings in a blunt deadpan that never misses. Only gradually does she allow reluctant glimpses of the fragility forced on her by the betrayal of her body.

Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock star in Samuel D. Hunter's gorgeous new play. Five stars.

It’s a hard-hitting, hard-laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront — the COVID pandemic, meth addiction, health insurance, shift pay — into an absorbing story you leave wanting much more of.

In Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf racks up the hits with ease, though the production feels more like watching home run derby than a full game. I couldn’t escape the nagging sensation, as I watched Samuel D. Hunter’s drama unfold, that the circumstances were all arrayed too perfectly for a Metcalf showcase, that they’re too custom-fitted to her skills—that there were diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best. Is it wrong to wish for more uncertainty, more risk, the presence of another team on the field? Metcalf and her director and frequent collaborator Joe Mantello commissioned this play from Samuel D. Hunter, whose work tends toward exquisite miniatures of his home state of Idaho, often with emotionally desperate queer men at their center.

Samuel D. Hunter’s latest begins as a very funny two-hander comedy in which Laurie Metcalf plays another of her sharp-tongued curmudgeons and Micah Stock brings to the stage a more svelte version of Brendan Fraser’s obese recluse from “The Whale,” also by Hunter. We know Metcalf can be a hilarious bitch. What’s fun is that Stock’s tortured schlub of a nephew turns out to be just as skilled at throwing the insults back at her.

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.)

Metcalf has the opposite assignment. Her secret weapon is her disdain for over-articulation, her empathic determination to honor those who struggle to speak for themselves, and that’s exactly what Hunter brings to the party as a playwright. It’s a spectacular combination that is, in today’s American theater, unique.

Little Bear Ridge Road’s melancholy softens with the introduction of graduate student James (John Drea), a potential hookup that evolves into dating despite Ethan’s curmudgeonly exterior. The unlikely threesome overlaps like a Venn diagram, its central point illuminated in the awkward, everyday language of people just trying to survive and communicate the best way they know how..

Only the ambiguous ending falters slightly, leaving Little Bear Ridge Road on a note that's more head-scratching than thought-provoking. But it doesn't take away from the fact that Little Bear Ridge Road is a superbly acted and achingly poignant 90 minutes of theatre. The characters may feel alien to each other and even themselves, but they're messily, sometimes infuriatingly, and altogether relatably human.

Now that I am done telling friends to grab tickets to Little Bear Ridge Road, let’s tell you about Samuel D. Hunter’s latest drama, which opened on Thursday at the Booth Theatre. Little Bear Ridge Road is a touching, quietly lovely play about a few lonely people tentatively—and painfully—making emotional connections. The intimate 95-minute work is sensitively interpreted by Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock, and others in a fine, strategically understated production keenly directed by Joe Mantello.

As if to convey the smallness of the characters’ world, Scott Pask’s set design consists of nothing more than the oversized couch and a gray circular rug, even when the scene shifts to the bar in which Ethan and James meet. At first it feels constraining. But when a drama features characters this vividly drawn, sometimes that’s all the scenery you need.

Scott Pask’s scenic design might seem a little…spare…for Broadway. It’s just the couch. Sure it’s shiny, maybe showroom-worthy; it even unfolds. Still, it’s a couch. But that couch becomes the back of the bar where Ethan meets James, and the locus of the makeshift family that James, Sarah and Ethan develop, and the site of some sadder moments in the lives of these people. At some points, it seems to represent the barrier between the characters; at other times, the family’s legacy. The couch started to symbolize their universe. Only in a production directed by Joe Mantello of a play written by Samuel D. Hunter could a couch feel so cosmic.'

If you’re seeking purely escapist fare, you might just want to head next door to “Buena Vista Social Club.” But more adventurous theatergoers, or anyone who loves great acting, should definitely turn onto “Little Bear Ridge Road.”

Had I not seen Grangeville at the Signature Center earlier this year, I might have qualms with Hunter retreading familiar territory. (Road premiered in Chicago in 2024.) Gifted though he might be, there’s only so much to be mined from a hypothetical scenario where one stays behind instead of going onto fantastic success as a celebrated playwright. But Grangeville denoted a new turn inward, critiquing the very penchant for self-pitying art that got him where he is. And Little Bear Ridge Road, despite Hunter’s status as a premiere writer for over a decade, is somehow his first on Broadway. There’s hardly a better one to leave his mark on the neighborhood and, at least with this production, save it from becoming the existential cul-de-sac it threatens to become.