A Master at Capturing Despair, Playwright Samuel D. Hunter Is Back With ‘Grangeville’

Few writers have captured despair more movingly or with less flash than Samuel D. Hunter. Like Sam Shepard and Tracy Letts, the Idaho-born and -bred playwright paints bleak, searing portraits of everyday lives under siege and on the margins. Yet Mr. Hunter’s landscapes tend to be more earnest and quietly shattering than most, drawing us in with their open-hearted naturalism and avoiding cynicism against all odds.Like much of his work, Mr. Hunter’s latest piece, “Grangeville,” is set in his native state, in the titular small city, at least partly. The play also unfolds in the Netherlands, where one of the two central characters, Arnold, an artist, has settled with his Dutch husband. Arnold’s older half-brother, Jerry, still lives in Grangeville, where they both grew up — though it becomes increasingly plain that while Arnold may have left his hometown years ago, he hasn’t recovered from the damage done there. Jerry was responsible for some of that damage; when the play opens, in fact, the brothers have been estranged for years. Arnold hasn’t been in touch with his mother either, so when Jerry calls him to discuss one of her unpaid bills, the younger half-sibling initially has no idea how bad things have gotten for his mom — or Jerry, for that matter.During long-distance conversations that eventually take place online — Jerry doesn’t even know how to share a screen at first, but he figures it out — it’s disclosed that the bill was the tip of an iceberg of health, financial, and relationship woes that have festered at home while Arnold was away licking his own wounds: over the past, over relationship issues with his spouse, over his seemingly stymied career and creativity.Paul Sparks and Brian J. Smith in ‘Grangeville.’ Emilio MadridIn fact, had “Grangeville” been written by a playwright who has shown less consistent, profound empathy and compassion for his characters than Mr. Hunter has, it might have seemed like a mea culpa: an acknowledgment of having been self-absorbed, or having given short shrift to people like Jerry, in art or in life. As played by an excellent Paul Sparks, under Jack Serio’s appropriately sensitive direction, Jerry has the earmarks of a chastened bully — a man who has learned through hard experience that the qualities that may have made him an alpha male in his youth, at least in a certain environment, don’t matter much in the big picture. There’s almost a sheepishness in some of his interactions with Arnold, who was often his victim in childhood but has surged past him as an adult, or so Jerry thinks.Mr. Sparks’s co-star, Brian J. Smith, is just as effective relaying the frustration and self-doubt eating away at Arnold, who at first seems merely impatient with Jerry. Both actors get to flesh out their characters’ challenges by assuming other roles: Mr. Sparks appears as Arnold’s husband, Bram, in a scene depicting their challenges, and Mr. Smith plays Jerry’s estranged wife, Stacey, who’s sympathetic to her longtime partner but eager to follow another path without him.The scenic design, by the collective dots, is starkly minimal through much of the play, leaving us to imagine the thousands of miles that separate Jerry and Arnold as much as their personalities and pursuits do. In the end, the two are finally brought together, so that the lingering tensions between them can be addressed face to face.This confrontation doesn’t quite pack the emotional wallop of the final moments in, for instance, “The Whale” — Mr. Hunter’s most famous work, thanks to a film adaptation — or his more recent “A Case for the Existence of God.” Still, “Grangeville” is completely compelling and characteristically full of grace, and well worth a visit.

A Master at Capturing Despair, Playwright Samuel D. Hunter Is Back With ‘Grangeville’

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