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.
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.
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..
| 2025 | Broadway |
Broadway |
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