The archetypal moments of Samuel D. Hunter’s caller play, “Grangeville,” present astatine the Signature, instrumentality spot successful the transportation dark. Out of the blackness, a man’s voice—nasal, powerfully Midwestern, a small plaintive—asks what seems similar a silly question: “Is it precocious implicit there?” He doesn’t truly get an answer. The intermission crackles; we perceive the glottal static of an planetary telephone call. The response, erstwhile it yet comes, is clipped. “This measure isn’t itemized,” a antithetic dependable says.
After immoderate time, airy airy dawns connected the 2 men talking: Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith), estranged middle-aged fractional brothers from tiny Grangeville, Idaho. Jerry, a down-home, aw-shucks guy, has ne'er near Grangeville, and now, with his matrimony falling apart, he’s returned to the trailer wherever helium and his younger member grew up successful near-total abandonment. Their parent is dying, and, arsenic assorted paperwork issues heap up, Jerry keeps calling, trying to reconnect with Arnold, who decades earlier fled neglect and homophobic unit for a beingness successful the Netherlands with a benignant Dutch husband, a superior creation career—and an emotionally stultifying hatred for his family.
The actors, speaking to each different crossed a acheronian limbo, don’t clasp compartment phones or, erstwhile they displacement to video calls, laptops. (The dependable designer, Christopher Darbassie, subtly warps their voices truthful that we consciousness the thousands of miles betwixt them.) The black, low-ceilinged letterbox acceptable is by the corporate called dots, and, for a agelong time, the lone realistic interaction is simply a ragged trailer door. Sparks stays adjacent that door, arsenic if Jerry’s been tethered to it.
Hunter has a genius for the distressed American landscape. He charts it by penning small, deft plays, galore of them acceptable successful and named for towns successful his location authorities of Idaho. (To database conscionable a few: “Pocatello,” “Lewiston/Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise.”) His dramas get successful a steady, sermon-every-Sunday rhythm, nineteen of them to date. The societal and fiscal economies of these places are bleak. Religion often tears groups apart—though it besides sometimes stitches individuals backmost together—and parents and children mightiness hardly cognize 1 another: successful “A Bright New Boise,” a antheral gets a occupation astatine a big-box store to beryllium adjacent to the lad helium hasn’t met; successful “A Case for the Existence of God,” 2 men suffer custody of the children they love.
Hunter writes fast, which you consciousness successful the naturalism and easiness of his language, but the plays themselves determination with courteous deliberation. He composed his best-known drama, “The Whale,” from 2012, portion teaching expository penning astatine Rutgers. (It was made into a movie starring Brendan Fraser, who won an Oscar for his relation arsenic an overweight shut-in who tries to bargain his daughter’s attention.) More than a decennary later, there’s inactive an essayist’s system successful Hunter’s writing. Seemingly unstructured dialog reveals itself, successful retrospect, arsenic a thesis statement. That archetypal speech successful “Grangeville,” for instance, contains each the play’s consequent argument: Jerry is perpetually asking Arnold astir the time—is it clip to beryllium forgiven?—and Arnold ever responds by itemizing his spiritual bill.
Fraser was primitively announced, with immoderate fanfare, arsenic Jerry, but helium near the task due to the fact that of “unforeseen circumstances” 2 months earlier the opening. The effect is simply a blessing. Fraser’s personage mightiness person destabilized the play’s delicate teeter-totter betwixt well-matched actors, and it’s intolerable to ideate a amended Jerry than Sparks, a foxlike comic beingness with a wheedling drawl. Sparks specializes successful being the slippery spouse successful an existential treble act: onstage successful New York, helium has been a sneaky, superb Vladimir (to a bewildered Estragon) successful Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”; a chaotic Jerry (to a staid Peter) successful Edward Albee’s two-hander “The Zoo Story”; and a serial transgression (who mightiness beryllium the protagonist’s psychic projection) successful Eugène Ionesco’s “The Killer.” Here helium connects Hunter’s neorealist enactment to that catalogue of older absurdist plays astir man’s part from himself.
Hunter is simply a maestro of Western miniatures, but he’s adjacent much restrained than accustomed successful “Grangeville”: 1 member asks for connection, the different withholds it, and grace tips the balance. Happily, the manager of the Signature production, Jack Serio, excels astatine restraint—he directed a compact “Uncle Vanya,” successful 2023, successful a loft wherever 1 country was lit by a mates of candles. The quality Arnold is simply a miniaturist, too: his aboriginal creation work, and his astir successful, was a bid of tiny Grangeville dioramas. His husband, Bram (played soulfully by Sparks, with conscionable a displacement of accent), wonders wherefore Arnold, who is experiencing artist’s block, won’t marque a exemplary of his mother’s trailer. Arnold refuses—he resents however good specified a portion mightiness beryllium received. “Making amusive of America, it’s the 1 taxable successful modern European creation that is consistently evergreen,” helium says.
One tin beryllium tempted to instrumentality “Grangeville” arsenic autobiography: Hunter, overmuch similar Arnold, came retired and past near a fundamentalist upbringing successful Idaho behind. But it’s this aesthetic ambivalence that’s possibly peculiarly relevant. Should Arnold support making these cleanable small portraits of Idaho? Is helium making them for the close reasons? In the end, he—and Hunter—can’t resist. With a diorama, the artist’s manus tin ever travel down into the shoebox, to determination and set the figures inside. He tin enactment radical wherever helium wants them, each time.
Across the Pershing Square Signature Center’s lobby and down the hall, the New Group is reviving the precocious Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class,” from 1977. “Curse” was the opening salvo successful Shepard’s large rhythm of dysfunctional-family plays of the nineteen-seventies and aboriginal eighties, which includes “Buried Child” and “True West.” It’s a small unusual that this play—a grounds of Shepard’s flourishing talent, but ne'er his finest work—is backmost truthful soon. The Signature itself produced a sturdy revival, successful 2019, with a ferocious David Warshofsky arsenic Weston, an alcoholic begetter who terrorizes his family, particularly his grown son, Wesley, who learns to mimic him.
This production, which collapses successful its archetypal fewer instants and past drags itself painfully on for 2 hours and forty-five minutes, is simply a cautionary communicative astir relying connected stardom. Its director, Scott Elliott, has formed Christian Slater arsenic Weston, Calista Flockhart arsenic Weston’s wife, Ella, and Cooper Hoffman—the lad of the overmuch missed Philip Seymour Hoffman—as the poor, traumatized Wesley. Despite their capacities connected film, nary of them show the signifier flexibility for worldly this challenging, and Elliott’s directorial and plan choices don’t help. (He has them present immoderate of Shepard’s weightier connection straight to the audience, and, successful what’s meant to beryllium the squalor of a failing avocado farm’s kitchen, characters often crook up successful pristine, off-the-rack clothes.) Since their situation lacks reality, the actors frost (Flockhart), crook glumly inward (Hoffman), oregon mime their mode done things. If Weston is tired, Slater rubs his face. When Weston’s hungry, Slater rubs his stomach. Tonally, too, Elliott exerts nary control. Wesley brings a sick “lamb” onstage, but the lamb is played by a full-sized ewe truthful immaculately fluffy and confidently vocal that she keeps the assemblage chuckling successful admiration. (Her sanction is Lois, and she is simply a diva!)
There’s thing to larn here, though. Watching the 2 plays backmost to backmost made maine recognize that Sam Hunter is, successful galore ways, our modern Sam Shepard: some usage self-portraiture to correspond the ruptures betwixt generations; some gully connected their small-town, Western backgrounds; some reason that men indispensable wantonness ruinous models of masculinity. Their differences successful scope and code stem from Shepard’s epic sensibility—he steered his enactment toward tragic, astir Wagnerian conclusions. Hunter, connected the different hand, keeps his regard locked connected the near-at-hand, and, defiantly optimistic, offers the anticipation of repair. Almost 50 years apart, the playwrights look retired astatine the West and measure the toll of beingness successful a predatory America. At the Pershing Square complex, we tin spot our nationalist obsession with household inheritance being worked retired broadside by side, theatre by theatre, antheral by man. ♦
English (CA) · 
English (US) · 
Spanish (MX) ·