Little Bear Ridge Road (3*)

 

Call me shallow, but enduring 90 minutes of mostly misery isn't how I want to spend a night on Broadway, even at reduced prices.  Based on "Little Bear Ridge Road," and "The Whale," the film adaptation of his 2012 drama, playwright Samuel D. Hunter seems to specialize in gay men in flyover country whose sense of victimhood gets in the way of their lives.  

Ethan (Micah Stock), a sad sack, shows up at the rural Idaho home of his aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalfe), bearing a grudge he has nursed since the age of ten, to settle the estate of his estranged father, a meth addict.  He's masked and within the first few minutes, the audience understands this is a Pandemic play with a capital "P," although covid isn't primarily responsible for the mismatched pair's isolation.  Sarah vacuums, Ethan mopes and they watch a series that may or may not feature aliens from a double Barcalounger, the only piece of furniture on stage.  It hints at a long-gone lover or husband.  

The "action" jumps forward quickly; along the way, Ethan hooks up with a budding astrophysicist whose metaphor about star watching forecasts the play's teachable moment (duh!), and Sarah, a nurse, is forced to disclose her treatment for cancer.  Before you know it, the pandemic is over and Ethan has begun to mirror his aunt's spirit but when given an opportunity to change his life, he scrolls his phone instead.  Director Joe Mantello more subtly indicts the role technology has had in stunting our emotional lives with "content" always distantly audible in the background.

Much of the audience found the characters' mostly tentative interactions funny, guffawing as if they were watching an episode of Roseanne, and may have come to see Metcalfe personify irascibility which she does, faultlessly.  The bond she develops with James (John Drea, pitch perfect in his kind befuddlement) suggests she wasn't always the fighter she is now, no thanks to Hunter, who provides so little backstory for either character that the audience is left to project their own motivations.

There's redemption, of a kind, narrated by a competent health care professional who can't pronounce "infinitesimal."  I didn't believe it for a moment.  People don't really change. Somewhere in Portland, Ethan is still feeling sorry for himself while James enjoys the kind of life available to most self-respecting gay men who get their asses to a big city.