On the remote outskirts of a small Idaho town, a razor-tongued aunt and her long-estranged nephew find themselves suddenly back in each other’s orbit—two lonely souls with a crumbling house to sell and a tangled history to unravel. Bitingly funny and quietly explosive, Little Bear Ridge Road is a sharply etched portrait of two people reaching across emotional galaxies—searching for meaning and fumbling toward connection, even as they fear it might swallow them whole. In this piercing and profound new play, the void is vast, the stars are indifferent, and love—messy, human, and hard-won—might be the only thing tethering us to Earth.
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..
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.'
| 2025 | Broadway |
Broadway |
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