Not once but twice towards the beginning of Samuel D. Hunter’s A Bright New Boise Leroy (Angus O’Brien), a volatile Hobby Lobby worker, says this to Will (Peter Mark Kendall), an intensely ruminative new Hobby Lobby employee: “I’m deliberately making you uncomfortable.”
There’s no way the easily triggered Leroy knows he’s speaking for the playwright, but he is. Already in this well-produced revival of Hunter’s play – premiered at Manhattan’s Wild Project in 2010 – the five Bright New Boise characters have demonstrated some form of disorienting nervousness. It’s Hunter’s inflexible aim to make not only them uncomfortable but also get audience members edgy in their seats.
As a matter of theater fact, Hunter makes this tactic a standard approach. An Idaho native, he has a habit of focusing on the Bright New Boise area and its uneasy inhabitants. As such, he already qualifies as Idaho’s playwright laureate.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Right now, moviegoers are getting a strong dose of the fidgets watching his screen adaptation of The Whale, for which he’s been accorded an undeserved nomination snub. In the film of his 2012 play, the obese title figure spends much time trying to mend fences with the daughter he abandoned many years earlier.
In The Whale, Hunter revisits a situation he had already probed in A Bright New Boise, a situation obviously still nagging at him. By the way, his title is intended to be snide, as there’s nothing especially bright or new transpiring in the Boise Hobby Lobby branch, and more specifically in the employee’s break room — evocatively designed by Wilson Chin with a prominent Exit sign hinting at eventual potentialities.
After being interviewed by acerbic and happily profane store manager Pauline (Eva Kaminska), 39-year-old Will takes the job. He doesn’t confide to her his real reason for applying. He’s learned that another of the Hobby Lobby workers is Alex (Ignazio Diaz-Silverio), the 17-year-old son he gave up for adoption many years earlier.
Will’s hope is to reunite with Alex, although he has no idea that the adolescent, though a gifted young man with aspirations to become a composer, is severely disturbed. Alex is unloved by his alcoholic adoptive parents and the victim of frequent panic attacks. His one protector is Hobby Lobby colleague Leroy, who by Hunter-created dramatic chance happens to be Alex’s brother.
The Will-Alex estrangement does reach a shaky rapport, but only shaky. Anything more would run counter to Hunter’s deliberate intention to make everyone on both sides of the footlights uncomfortable.
Certainly, he sets it up that discomfort affects the five Hobby Lobby clock-watchers, perhaps the proficient Pauline the least on tenterhooks. She’s only concerned that the store runs smoothly. Alex, slowly accepting Will in his life, is dissatisfied with his compositions, one of which he eventually presents. Leroy, valued because he knows the art supplies section best, remains quick to anger. Fifth employee Anna (Anna Baryshnikov) is incorrigibly ill-at-ease due to an unsettled home life and habitually stays on the premises after hours to read.
(Incidentally, ticket buyers are in their rights to wonder why in a large Hobby Lobby branch so few employees populate the break room.)
As for Will, the relationship with Alex is only part of his severe discontent. Now living in his car after leaving the New Life Church north of Boise under suspicious circumstances, he’s awaiting the promised Rapture. While waiting, he’s writing a blog available to readers. Those include Anna, with whom he’s having a mild flirtation.
Oh, yes, MacArthur Fellowship recipient Hunter has plenty brewing in A Bright New Boise. There’s the initial emphasis on father-son ties and then the later emphasis on the joys and woes of faith. Hunter has created striking, impulsive and compulsive characters, all played by an accomplished quintet and directed by Oliver Butler with understanding of the Hobby Lobby timeclock-punchers strengths and weaknesses.
Hunter also has a pronounced gift for ironic humor. No matter what’s afoot in the way of conflicts between and among Will, Alex, Pauline, Leroy, and Anna, Hunter keeps patrons chuckling, if not outright laughing. Note, however, that the laughs aren’t aimed at those five but in perceptive recognition that people can be amusing even when caught in trying times.
Those are the aspects primed to offset a noticeable Bright New Boise drawback. While doing proficiently with the first two-thirds of the action, Hunter risks focusing on more than he can handle. The drama’s action starts with Will spotlighted demanding “Now” four times. Yet, whatever he wants in that urgent “now” isn’t revealed until much later.
It’s an enveloping desire for the Rapture, evidently Will’s sole motivation for going on. Suddenly, even his need to repair the relationship with Alex hasn’t sufficient weight to alleviate the pain he finds in an unrewarding life. (Is Hunter using “Will” for its double meaning?)
But the all-but-sudden emphasis on faith – on his faith in the world’s Rapturous end and his ascendent into a much better realm – is accentuated only towards the play’s last quarter. This has the effect not of bolstering Hunter’s purposes but undermining them. Put metaphorically, suddenly shifting goalposts makes it harder to score the winning point.
Hunter leaves the audience appreciating the play’s many parts but unsure of its whole. Whether or not Alex finally experiences the Rapture he seeks, patrons aren’t provided enough of their cathartic rapture.
A Bright New Boise opened February 21, 2023, at Signature Center and runs through March 12. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
