How ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’ paved Samuel D. Hunter’s road to Broadway

The family drama starring Laurie Metcalf marks a major milestone for the playwright, widely known for adapting his play The Whale into an Oscar-winning film.

Summary

• Award-winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter discusses making his Broadway debut with the family drama Little Bear Ridge Road
• The play stars Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock as an estranged aunt and nephew reestablishing a connection
• Hunter shares insight into collaborating with Metcalf; setting his work in his home state of Idaho; and writing about the meaningful interactions between ordinary people

Award-winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter is achieving a major first. Little Bear Ridge Road, a family drama starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock beginning October 7 at the Booth Theatre, marks his Broadway debut.

Let's just say it: Finally! Audiences who’ve savored Hunter's acclaimed Off-Broadway plays — among them A Bright New Boise, A Case for the Existence of God, Grangeville, and The Whale, which he adapted into an Oscar-winning 2022 film — have grown impatient about this milestone. But Hunter takes the timing in stride.

“I’ve never worked at one of the theatres that have both an Off-Broadway and a Broadway space,” he told New York Theatre Guide. “So, even when I had plays that went really, really well, the idea of a commercial transfer was a pretty big lift.”

His dramatic genre has also factored into the equation, he acknowledged; he often writes about the ordinary yet quietly profound interactions between everyday people. Put another way, “I’m interested in making non-theatrical things theatrical,” said Hunter. “I’ve just had to prove over the years that my plays actually can occupy very large spaces. My plays aren’t big and flashy and loud.”

Over the past decade and a half, Hunter has been honored with Obie, Drama Desk, and Lucille Lortel Awards and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Along with the plays themselves, the prizes offer a reminder that quiet dramas can sneak up on you and deliver a surprising wallop. Hunter’s plays don’t shout, but they speak volumes.

Expect that in Little Bear Ridge Road, arriving in New York fresh from a hit world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The group commissioned the play as a vehicle for founding member Metcalf, who’s gone on to earn two Tonys, four Emmys, and an Oscar nomination.

Focused on the awkward reunion of a nurse named Sarah (Metcalf) with her aimless nephew Ethan (Stock, a Tony nominee and Theatre World Award winner for It's Only a Play) in the wake of a family death, the story quietly explores grief, the fragility of connections, and moving on. “The ideas are literally as big as the universe,” Hunter acknowledged.

That said, he’s a writer famous for plainspoken eloquence. He’s not keen, he said, on crafting “heady monologues and complex metaphors” that grab the spotlight. “There’s not a lot of poetry in my plays,” he said. “My plays have a lot of false starts and awkward pauses and cut-off sentences. I hope that makes them a more effective vehicle for the actors.”

Raised in Warsaw, Idaho, Hunter centers his dramatic world in his home state. August Wilson had Pittsburgh’s Hill District; Horton Foote had the fictional Harrison, Texas; and Hunter's stories have previously unfolded in Boise, Pocatello, and Lewiston. His Broadway-debut show takes plays outside Troy.

Asked about the power of place in his work, Hunter observed that Idaho’s population is sparse. “It's a landscape where my ideas very naturally fit,” he said. “I write so much about isolation, loneliness, and the need for human connection.”

Hunter’s latest show in New York has an even deeper personal link to Idaho. “My dad lives in a house on Little Bear Ridge Road, which is about 25 miles outside of my hometown,” he said. “It’s one of the few places where you can very, very clearly see the belt of the galaxy every single night when it’s a clear night.”

Hunter said he “wrote a large swath” of Little Bear Ridge Road there. About 30 pages into the work, which was originally about a mother and son, Hunter had a moment of clarity and pivoted the core dynamic.

“[A mother/son play] seemed overly familiar,” he said. “The relationship between an aunt and a nephew can be very, very close, or it can be almost nonexistent.” That freed him up creatively as he worked on the play, which includes two other characters: another nurse (Meighan Gerachis) and a man (John Drea) who comes into Ethan’s life.

Hunter is a longtime friend of Stock, but he didn’t know Metcalf or director Joe Mantello, just their work. Up close, Metcalf’s “unfussy and uncomplicated” approach to acting was remarkable, said Hunter. “She just wants to work.” Collaborating with both her and Mantello during the play’s Chicago run, he added, “was a wonderful time.”

Hunter’s Broadway debut comes just a couple weeks after his debut in London's West End with Clarkston, a play about workers in a big-box store seen off Broadway in 2018. (Heartstopper's Joe Locke stars in London.) He said he hopes both Clarkston and Little Bear Ridge Road lead to the same takeaway.

“What I always hope is that there's some utility in my plays,” he said. “That it’s helped people articulate something about their own lives or that it sheds some light or opens up a space in your brain and heart.”

He paused for a beat, as though considering. “That's very twee,” he said. “But I mean it earnestly.”

Get Little Bear Ridge Road tickets now.

Top image credit: Samuel D. Hunter. (Photo by Josia Bania)
In-article image credit: Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock in Little Bear Ridge Road in Chicago. (Photos by Michael Brosilow)