Playwright Samuel D. Hunter made a startling off-Broadway debut in 2012 with The Whale. He followed this with an impressive string, including Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements, and his masterpiece thus far: last spring’s A Case for the Existence of God. His first play to reach New York, though—in 2010, at the off-off-Broadway Wild Project—was A Bright New Boise. Signature Theatre, as part of Hunter’s five-year playwrighting residency, has followed Case for Existence with a full and perhaps slightly revised production of that first Hunter play. This is no mere juvenilia, mind you. The little-seen initial staging won the playwright an Obie Award, with the combined promise of Boise and The Whale alone enough to earn him a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “genius grant”).
The hallmarks of Hunter’s work are all present in A Bright New Boise: the underclass workers crushed by the confines of dead-end realities; the all-but-impossible quest to escape from struggles with mental health, addiction, and “crazy end-times churches” (not necessarily in that order). Plus that Idaho locale, with the wilds of untamed nature and forgotten small-town oblivion overtaken by an invasion of big-box stores and fundamentalism. Idaho is as physically and psychologically persistent—and as much an omnipresent presence—as New England is to Eugene O’Neill and all those Tyrones. Rockbound, Puritan New England serves as background to many plays by many writers; as far as we can recall, Hunter has Idaho to himself.
Hunter places his action in the bleak break room in a Hobby Lobby store in Boise. (It is unknown whether the small-town Idaho native spent after-school hours working at Hobby Lobby, but if he did it is quite clear that the Christian-owned chain will never herald him as an illustrious former employee.) While an in-house corporate video plays unheeded in the background, we meet Pauline (Eva Kaminsky), the up-from-the-ranks manager responsible for keeping the branch profitable; Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), an introverted teenaged clerk prone to anxiety attacks; and his slightly older brother, Leroy (Angus O’Brien), whose clean white t-shirt emblazoned with the word “FUCK” makes him instantly stand out. An artist in training at Boise State University, Leroy has designed the shirt as a provocative statement. Stranded among them is the even more introverted clerk Anna (Anna Baryshnikov). A few lines of dialogue—about Anna’s domineering and presumably abusive home life, and her habit of reading in the break room after closing because books are not permitted at home—suggest that this character might well provide Hunter with a starting point for a play of her own.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Propelling the action is new hire Will (Peter Mark Kendall), an adult with not only a mysterious past but a mysterious present. And there, as they say, hangs the tale; if A Bright New Boise is not quite up to the excellence of Hunter’s recent plays, it is perhaps because the plotting is both too visible and too much. That said, the quality of the writing, the vibrant coloring of the characters, and the stark originality of the playwright’s chosen milieu are already apparent, elements which make Boise well worth a Signature visit.
The players, under the direction of Oliver Butler (What the Constitution Means to Me), are impeccable. Newcomer Diaz-Silverio is wonderful as the young clerk at the plot’s center. He walks about with his forehead hidden by a cascade of curls, as if perennially covered by a storm cloud of oppression. Brooding and understandably depressed, yes; but Diaz-Silverio reveals the sensitive teen beneath it all and is a joy to watch. (According to his program bio, he is already slated for leading roles in upcoming film and television projects.) O’Brien, also making his off-Broadway debut, is at once terrifyingly off-putting but—when he turns on that smile—charmingly friendly.
Baryshnikov, meanwhile, captures the mass of fear hidden behind Anna’s youthful, attractive exterior. Kaminsky, as the foul-mouthed but understanding store manager, continually sparks the play and the production. Kendall alone, as the outsider with excessive baggage from “up outside of Coeur d’Alene,” is not quite as convincing as he tries to convey the rage beneath his cautiously polite manner. He does not ring true when his character slips into doomsday mode, but this might be more an issue of the writing than the acting.
Wilson Chin’s break room is a marvel of banality, complete with tatty furnishings, weary lockers, corporate wall hangings, and that mostly ignorable but centrally located television set hanging from the ceiling. The programming—with full credit to projection and video designer Stefania Bulbarella—features a nondescript pair of Hobby Lobby commentators demonstrating special promotions. The satellite feed, though, “gets all screwy” when it rains and is periodically hijacked by surgeries-in-progress from a medical channel.
Said surgeries are not, initially, quite identifiable. (Sample dialogue for store manager Pauline: “Godammit. What is that, an ear? That’s an ear, isn’t it? Goddammit.”) As we reach the climax of the play, the surgery seems—at least to this unpracticed eye—to represent a pulsing mass of tissue with a large tumor being cut away. Which is an apt description of the plays of Samuel D. Hunter, who got out of Idaho with an NYU scholarship but has ever remained, in his plays at least, tethered in the so-called Gem State.
A Bright New Boise opened February 21, 2023, at Signature Center and runs through March 12. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
