Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Little Bear Ridge Road
On 12 acres of property in Idaho on the top of the ridge, the sky is so intense it makes Ethan (Micah Stock) panicky because he feels that his life is insignificant against the vastness of the galaxy glittering before him. Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), Ethan’s aunt, who owns the property and appreciates the nighttime view, tells him she “thought once about buying a telescope, but you know. Then I’d own a telescope.” The audience’s laughter responding to this revelation of her edgy, funny character peppers Samuel D. Hunter’s powerful, sardonic Little Bear Ridge Road currently at the Booth Theatre.
Metcalf is terrific as Sarah, who delivers comments like darts hitting a bullseye and evoking laughter because her words are heavy with authenticity. Her meaningful statements pointedly eschew the gentility of polite conversation. Micah, by contrast, is withdrawn, remote and masked, not only because the play begins during the COVID-19 pandemic, but because he wears his soul’s damage on the outside, with a covering of silence. Interestingly, these two estranged family members, one a nurse who doesn’t even tend her own wounds, the other a self-damaged young man of 30 who can’t really get out of his own way, eventually get along,
With this Broadway debut, Hunter (The Whale, A Bright New Boise) weaves a poignant, humorous, fascinating dynamic. Metcalf and Stock inhabit these individuals with humanity and a fullness of life that is breathtaking.
Mantello directs
Directed crisply with excellent pace and verve by Joe Mantello, Hunter’s comedic drama, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theater Company, confronts human isolation and failed familial relationships. Hunter presents individuals who confuse self-supporting independence with misguided self-reliance. With spare, concise dialogue the playwright explores how they rekindle their sensitivity and open up while nursing their fractured, self-victimized souls, to help each other without acknowledging it as help.
Finally, Hunter’s dialogue has flourishes of well-placed poetic grace and rhythm. Within its meta-themes about human beings’ struggles with themselves, it’s also about knowing when to let go to encourage another’s growth.
Getting reacquainted
Aunt Sarah and nephew Ethan have an ersatz reunion when Ethan’s father, Sarah’s brother, dies and leaves the nearby house and estate to Ethan to dispose of. Estranged from his father and from her for a number of years, Ethan, who is gay, has lived in Seattle. His older partner emotionally abused him and self-medicated with a cocaine habit. Eventually, they split.
After graduating from university with an MFA in writing, Ethan drifted, stunned by his devastating childhood. Because his mother abandoned him, his father, Leon, raised him. However, Leon’s addiction to meth destroyed any positive emotional feelings between them. How does Ethan learn not to duplicate his problematic relationship with his father, seeking abusive love relationships with other older men?
For her part, Sarah remained near where she was born in Idaho, and worked as a nurse during her marriage and after her husband left her. Fortunately or unfortunately, they had no children. She and Ethan are the only Fernsbys left on the planet, dooming their family line to extinction, a fact that unsettles Ethan. Having sold her home, Sarah tells Ethan she moved to a more remote area because “It suits me better. Not being around—people.”
Proud of her independence
With her prickly self-reliance and proud refusal of help, Sarah has taken care of her house and property, worked, paid her bills, and organized documents and paperwork for Leon, her brother. She generously gave Leon money to help him. When Ethan declares that was a bad idea because his father used it for his meth habit, Sarah states she doesn’t know what he used it for. After all, Leon told her that he never did meth in front of Ethan. The truth lies elsewhere.
After the pandemic passes and circumstances improve, the relationship between aunt and nephew also improves. They communicate more intimately. They watch a TV series and comment about the characters. The dialogue is funny and Sarah and Ethan become family. Assumptions and mistaken views are dismissed and overturned. Realistic expectations fill in the gaps. A surprise occurs when Ethan meets and forms an attachment with James (the excellent John Drea).
A catalyst
James provokes a turning point. He comes from a more privileged, loving background and is studying at a nearby university to be a stargazer for real, an astrophysicist. With eloquence James explains to Ethan the magnificence of Orion’s Belt as it relates to our sun. Sarah welcomes him and encourages his relationship with Ethan, until once more circumstances gyrate in another direction, all perfectly unfolding with the emotion of the characters.
When Ethan discovers Sarah has cancer, her self-reliance raises its ugly head. She refuses his help and becomes angry if she senses his pity or emotional concern. Her resigned, matter-of-fact attitude about her condition seems both heroic and nihilistic. So Ethan approaches helping her in another way.
Mantello arranges the interlocking dynamic among Sarah, Ethan and then James center stage on a “couch in a void.” From there the characters converse, sit, enter and leave stage right (to an invisible kitchen) or stage left (to bedrooms). The recliner couch on a turntable platform in different positions establishes the passage of time between 2020 and 2022. Scott Pask’s set and the lighting by Heather Gilbert are symbolic and interpretive. Our focus becomes the characters’, as well as the actors’ exceptional portrayals as their characters struggle to find a home with each other and themselves until the threads of grace in their alignment come to a necessary end.
After all, the Fernsbys have to have a legacy, if not in offspring, then in words. And the respite and connections they find together talking and watching TV on a “couch in a void” become the place where Ethan’s legacy in writing is born, and the Fernbys’ legacy prevails.
Little Bear Ridge Road is at the Booth Theater through February 15, 2026.
