By Bill Hirschman
(Once again, Florida Theater On Stage is reviewing current shows playing this winter on and off-Broadway, many of which will be touring locally or mounted by a local company. Today, Little Bear Ridge Road, which closes February 15. Coming up over this month, reviews of Ragtime; Chess; Oh, Mary. We already reviewed Beau the Musical and Liberation.)
Visually, Little Bear Ridge Road is minimalist – solely a circular platform with a sofa – appropriate because the script calls for it to be surrounded by a black void.
But emotionally, Samuel D. Hunter’s Broadway drama directed by Joe Mantello uses that to focus on two troubled, difficult people reluctantly trying to connect to discover themselves and each other in physical, geographical and emotional isolation.
Set in Hunter’s usual rural Idaho, this time at the height of the pandemic, Sara Fernsby, an older nurse, and her nephew Ethan, a frozen writer in his 20s, are reluctantly thrown together first by a relative’s death and later as the sole source of no-constraints interaction.
No review should proceed further without mouth-dropping adulation of Laurie Metcalf’s — well, we can’t demean it as a performance – her complete vanish inside Sarah, a scratchy craggy creature who has come to terms with being emotionally isolated from people, even preferring it to pain. Reportedly, Hunter tailored the part for her return last year to the Steppenwolf clan she spent years gracing.
First, the premise: Ethan (Micah Stock) has come back to the family’s longtime homestead with Sarah to sell his late father’s house. There is little or no connection let alone grief between the two because the father’s drug use cauterized both of these survivors years ago.
Ethan’s not planning to stay any longer than settling the estate will require, but his life in Seattle is mostly a toxic relationship and a stalled literary career. So, there’s not much encouraging a quick return. But it doesn’t help that Sarah is brusque, borderline cold when she communicates much at all; she allows him stay for a little while because it’s an expected courtesy among the last members of a family.
But as time passes, months after months over two years, we see the tendrils of connection inching forward. This is not, in any way, some kind of crude shallow movie-of-the-week charting a sentimental mingling. Oddly enough, they link up watching television shows as they sit together on the sofa.
These are people in pain, but who battle loneliness with dry sharp humor (one of Metcalf’s masterful strengths, although some line readings echo Roseanne).
Of course, over the next 95 intermissionless minutes, hidden levels of character and inner secrets drip out. Ethan doesn’t announce, nor does he hide his homosexuality. (He starts a promising relationship with a gay man in the area played by John Drea.) But when it is clear, Sarah retorts, “You think I had an issue? That was the most interesting thing about you.”
Metcalf, Stock, Mantello and Hunter (The Whale and A Bright New Boise) ease these arcs toward a kind of poignant resolution.
Mantello subtly but skillfully elicits all that Hunter intends, but his expertise is especially deft in his moving the bodies around, in and through every conceivable physical aspect of staging on the spare setting. In other hands, this might play flatter, but not here. We’ll see when this gets picked up in regional theaters.
Little Bear Ridge Road is at the Booth Theatre through Feb. 15. Running time 95 minutes, no intermission.
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