Some people when faced, say, with cancer, prefer to keep their health crisis secret. It often comes from a desire to protect loved ones from pain or to not be treated like a victim. But it can also be about autonomy.
In Samuel D. Hunter’s beautiful play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” the remarkable actress Laurie Metcalf (“Roseanne,” “The Conners”) plays such a woman. Sarah, from the playwright’s native Idaho, is a gruff, determined red-state American who hates dependency with every fiber of her being. “It’s no one’s business but mine! It’s my body!,” she shouts at one point. “Can I just have control over one thing, just my own damn body?”
“Little Bear Ridge Road” originated with a commission and this same cast at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and is one of three productions within a year to move from that storied, 50-year-old company to Broadway. That’s courtesy in this case of once-exiled producer and longtime Steppenwolf collaborator Scott Rudin, Metcalf and the gifted director, Joe Mantello, who, having directed “Wicked,” now clearly wants to spend his remaining time as far away from big-budget spectacle as possible.
“Little Bear” has just four characters: Metcalf’s Sarah; her stopped-up nephew Ethan (Micah Stock); Ethan’s potential boyfriend, James (John Drea); and, briefly, a healthcare worker (Meighan Gerachis). The only physical item on Scott Pask’s deceptive set is a beige couch.
The story could not seem simpler. Ethan, a struggling Millennial with an MFA in creative writing, has returned home from Seattle to deal with his meth-addict father’s estate, such as it is. Ethan is stuck — and to a large extent, “Little Bear” is about stuckness, the inability to pack away the past sufficiently to make necessary change in your life.
But the central question of this 90 minutes of theater is not just whether or not aunt and nephew, who really are all each other has, can overcome past guilt and resentment to forge a functional relationship. It’s whether they can find it in their hearts and minds to admit they need one. You know, assuming they actually do.
If you are someone who finds it hard to talk about personal feelings, or love someone in that category, especially if that someone is in existential crisis, you will likely find this play very moving.
Even by Metcalf’s lofty standards, this is one stunner of a performance.
I’ve seen it twice now and it has only deepened. At one point, a moment I don’t want to spoil with more detail, Sarah’s pain gets vocally manifest in a great, guttural howl, or it would if Sarah could sufficiently unblock her voice.
Metcalf is one of the few great actors who can show you both of these things at once: the feelings her character can express and those she cannot. If you are a student of how actors illuminate subtext while simultaneously honoring how trapped some Americans get in repressed feelings, it’s a revelation. And Cole, who puts everything he has into the ring with this heavyweight prize-fighter, rises to meet Metcalf at every moment he can.
The other thing about Metcalf is that she is determinedly unpretentious. Most characters in plays are far more articulate and self-confident than we are in reality, and thus most actors learn to be the same.
Hunter even includes one of those very characters in this play; the possible boyfriend who has had a charmed life by comparison and struggles to understand a different kind of childhood. He’s sweet, verbose and clueless and Drea has the assignment down.
Metcalf has the opposite assignment. Her secret weapon is her disdain for over-articulation, her empathic determination to honor those who struggle to speak for themselves, and that’s exactly what Hunter brings to the party as a playwright.
It’s a spectacular combination that is, in today’s American theater, unique.
