Writers of all stripes are often duly praised for giving voice to people we might not come across in our everyday lives. In the case of Idaho-born-and-bred playwright Samuel D. Hunter, that has meant bringing something particularly vital to audiences in our parts in recent years—by shedding light into corners many urbane New Yorkers perhaps read about, or hear described on NPR, but never really see or process. With plays such as A Bright New Boise, The Whale and The Harvest, Hunter has mined the funny, searing humanity of working-class characters in a fly-over Western state, revealing them to be just as complicated, weird and deserving of empathy and respect as our own neighbors. Even more than, say, Sam Shepard or Tracy Letts, to cite two of his brilliant predecessors, Hunter seems to take pains to make those characters feel familiar and accessible.
This is particularly true in Hunter’s latest effort, Lewiston/Clarkston, a riveting, haunting two-part play previously performed as separate works. In the new production at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, audience members sit around and essentially among the fictional inhabitants of Lewiston, Idaho and Clarkston, Washington, small towns separated by a river and respectively named after the renowned explorers Meriweather Lewis and William Clark. Western expansion and its mixed, troubled legacy are central to the play, and even within the small confines of the converted church that is Rattlestick’s space, Hunter and director Davis McCallum, aided by Dane Laffrey’s minimalist set design, credibly evoke the banks of a river, where Lewiston unfolds, and the huge box store where Clarkston‘s characters work—a looming symbol of how the idealism driving Lewis and Clark’s mission has curdled into crass corporate opportunism.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★ review here.]
We are reminded, in both plays—separated by a half-hour intermission, during which audience members can share a meal—that both that historic mission and its leaders were flawed, by factors ranging from imperialism to personal demons. Hunter isn’t preaching about the inherent corruption of powerful nations or their heroes; it’s human fallibility in the context of larger social forces that intrigues and moves him. His characters here include distant descendants of Lewis and Clark, among them Alice, a woman in her seventies running a fireworks stand near the Snake River just outside Lewiston, and Jake, a young man who has traveled west to Clarkston hoping to both embrace his past and escape, or at least put off, a disturbing future.
In Lewiston, the more perfect of the play’s extraordinary parts, Alice and her longtime partner, the fiftysomething Connor, find their relatively staid co-existence interrupted by the sudden arrival of Alice’s granddaughter, Marnie, whom she hasn’t seen since a family tragedy ripped them apart some 15 years ago, when Marnie was still a child. Now 24, Marnie has turned up after having invested someone else’s money—her late mother’s, she believes—in an urban farm; disenchanted with that project, she now hopes to dissuade the grandmother she still deeply resents from selling off any remaining family land.
The suitcases of assumptions Marnie brings to her reunion with Alice—and Connor, whom she also knew as a child—are challenged with the greatest patience and wit in dialogue that is, characteristically, at once naturalistic and poetically heightened by a keen sense of the beautifully drawn characters’ inner lives and their resigned (at least in Alice’s and Connor’s cases) places in the world. Under McCallum’s intuitive, compassionate direction, the actors—Kristin Griffith as Alice, Arnie Burton as Connor, Leah Karpel as Marnie, all superb—give performances of startling emotional transparency. To watch the miraculously expressive Griffith listen to a recording of Alice’s dead daughter’s voice from just a few feet away is to experience something rare and wondrous, no matter how vast your theatergoing background.
The characters in Lewiston must learn to evolve and let go, painfully, as do the three we meet in Clarkston: Jake, a recent graduate of an elite college who has recently learned he has Huntington’s disease; Chris, his co-worker loading crates at a local Costco, and Chris’s mom, Trisha, who has struggled with a meth addiction at least since Chris’s dad abandoned her, probably longer.
The scourge of drugs, a factor of contemporary American life as large and pernicious as dwindling job security and growing economic inequality—and inextricably related to those problems—also figures, briefly, in Lewiston. With Chris and Trisha, it’s the foundation for a co-dependent relationship far more destructive than the one between Alice and Connor, with Trisha emerging, in Heidi Armbruster’s wrenchingly human performance, as a clearly abusive mother—though one who, like many in her condition, has also suffered greatly.
Chris, a closeted aspiring writer played with a stunning and heartbreaking mix of repressed despair and sheer good will by Edmund Donovan, also suffers for his sympathy for, and attraction to, Jake, who carries a selfishness, born of years of privilege—conveyed with winning wryness by Noah Robbins—that tests Chris’s and our patience, his degenerative and ultimately fatal condition notwithstanding.
But Hunter’s characters have limited resources to turn to for affirmation and grace, and like others in Lewiston/Clarkston, Jake and Chris manage to find them in each other. There are the natural resources as well, the play reminds us, plundered and commodified over centuries but still there, their resilience staggering and inspiring us. Both parts of the play end with characters staring out at the river, finding comfort amid fresh recollections of loss. Leave it to Hunter, right at this moment, to find something beautiful beyond dispute that unites us as Americans, and as all people living here.
Lewiston/Clarkson opened October 25, 2018, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and runs through December 16. Tickets and information: rattlestick.org
