Paul Sparks (left) plays Jerry, and Brian J. Smith is his half-brother Arnold (“Arnie”) in Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville.
Grangeville, the title of Samuel D. Hunter’s new piece is, as in most of his plays—Pocatello, Lewiston/Clarkston, Greater Clements (but not The Whale)—the Idaho setting of his latest drama, a two-hander about estranged half-brothers coming together to rehash a lot of anguished family history. If the result is disappointing, it’s because Hunter is working over well-tilled ground.
Sparks and Smith play characters who have been estranged for years in Grangeville.
The brothers in Grangeville—Jerry (Paul Sparks), who lives in the town, and Arnie (Brian J. Smith), a gay man who lives in the Netherlands—reconnect after Jerry asks Arnie’s help in dealing with their mother’s estate. She is nearing death, and Jerry is overwhelmed by financial issues to resolve. Arnie resents being pulled back into the unhealthy relationships and memories that he left behind. He has lived in Europe for 17 years with his Dutch husband, Bram, while Jerry stayed in their narrow-minded Idaho burg to look after their mother.
Grangeville might hit harder if several blocks away there weren’t a superb revival of Arthur Miller’s The Price, a richer play in which two estranged brothers rehash the issues of staying to care for an ailing parent vs. striking out to fulfill one’s own destiny.
Arnie’s reason for fleeing Grangeville has another layer, of course. He was also fleeing anti-gay prejudice common in small-town America—much of it from his stepfather and Jerry—and he resents revisiting that time:
It’s like no matter what memory it is, no matter how seemingly innocuous it is, it always leads straight to shit. It’s like being stuck in a maze and no matter what path you choose there’s just black holes everywhere that you keep falling into.
Again, this is familiar dramatic territory. Far downtown, in Wounded, one can find a gay character who returns from New York to a small Texas town where bigotry drove him away. As for the struggles of being of an artist and finding self-fulfillment, one might cite John Logan’s Red or Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration.
Hunter’s structure doesn’t make it easy going either, at least under Jack Serio’s direction. The play begins with voices in darkness, leaving Stacey Derosier’s lighting to do some heavy lifting during a long, static opening. Ever so gradually, a door comes into focus, then silhouettes, and finally looming gray stucco brutalist walls (by the collective dots) that suggest a prison. Derosier’s illumination shifts smartly when the brothers are on a video conference, becoming two triangular lights reaching downstage but not intersecting.
Gradually the brothers reach a rapprochement in Hunter’s Idaho-set drama. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
Moreover, at various times the script calls for a transition—in one, Arnie suddenly becomes Jerry’s wife, Stacey, without a change of costume and only a brief mention; the clue comes after they are well into a conversation about exchanging their children—a tipoff that the actors aren’t playing Arnie and Jerry, who is now separated, but Jerry and Stacey.
As in most American dramas about dysfunctional families, secrets have to be spilled periodically, but at least Hunter is blessed with two terrific actors. Sparks is a low-key, chin-up Jerry, who perseveres through all the disadvantages and sacrifices that he has made. Homeless except for their mother’s trailer, where he has taken up residence, he has come to realize how cruel he was to Arnie:
I know it may sound weird, but it’s been sorta helpful? I think I said this the other day, but I don’t remember stuff all that well, and staying here has, like, reminded me of a lot of stuff, some of it good but a lot of it not so great. …
Smith has more emotional colors to his role: deeply resentful at first, then slowly accommodating after he learns that Jerry has been following his art career, and then more anguished as Arnie’s personal and artistic lives collapse. He has experienced impostor syndrome, and the fact that people prefer his earlier work (in dioramas) is as much an albatross to him as it is to Woody Allen:
Jerry: You always spoke about making a diorama of your childhood home, that would have been fantastic. You should still do that! …
Arnold: The sad thing is that diorama would probably bring in more money than anything I’ve made in the last ten years. …
Jerry: Well, people liked them.
Arnold: Yeah, for a while. I was a fascination, this bumpkin from Idaho who didn’t go to any of the right schools. I could only coast on that for so long.
For fans of the unquestionable talented Hunter, Grangeville may be worth catching, but the dramatic obstacles it poses are unlikely to give it staying power.
Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville plays through March 23 at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit signaturetheatre.org.
Playwright: Samuel D. Hunter
Director: Jack Serio
Sets: dots
Lighting: Stacey Derosier
Costumes: Ricky Reynoso
Sound: Christopher Darbassie
