Searching for Answers in ‘A Bright New Boise’

Samuel D. Hunter’s Obie Award-winning play “A Bright New Boise,” which had its premiere in 2010 and is now being produced for the first time off-Broadway, is often billed as a dark comedy, a term that is perhaps misleading here, or at least incomplete.As anyone who has followed Mr. Hunter knows, the bleak, sometimes acidic humor in his plays isn’t quite the kind you’d find in those of, say, Martin McDonagh or Sam Shepard, the latter of whom Mr. Hunter, as a chronicler of life in the American West, is more frequently compared. However biting his wit or superficially depressing his scenarios, Mr. Hunter’s work — recently featured on screen in “The Whale,” an adaptation of his 2012 play directed by Darren Aronofsky — is distinguished by an unironic sense of spiritual yearning, and of hope.Simply put, this Idaho-bred, New York-based playwright has maintained as positive a view of humanity as one could expect from anybody of his intelligence. And that, clearly, has something to do with faith, a subject that invariably informs his haunting accounts of lonely people searching, often in struggling or disenfranchised communities, for meaning and connection.That doesn’t mean that Mr. Hunter is an advocate of organized religion; he has been critical of its practice in his work. A gay man who attended a fundamentalist Christian high school, the playwright has sometimes been evasive on the subject of his personal beliefs. Yet in an interview with American Theatre last year, he expressed frustration with the politicization of Christianity in this country, asking, “How about a church that’s about spirituality?”That is, essentially, the question plaguing the protagonist of “Boise,” though his quest to answer it takes him in very different directions, with darker consequences. Will, a man in his late 30s, has arrived in the titular Idaho town from the more upscale city of Coeur d’Alene, looking for “a change of scenery,” or so he says when asked in the first scene. In truth, Will is both running from the fallout of a horrific event and trying to reconnect with his more distant past. He finds employment at a local branch of Hobby Lobby, the Christian-owned arts and crafts chain that made actual headlines shortly after this play won its Obie, when it filed a federal lawsuit protesting new regulations that required companies to provide employees access to emergency contraception. But as Pauline, the store’s no-nonsense manager explains it, the store is more devoted to the gospel of capitalism.“Do you know anything about unions?” Pauline, played by a razor-sharp, hilarious Eva Kaminsky, asks Will brusquely before hiring him. “They’re no good,” he replies, being no fool. In the break room where “Boise” unfolds — a model of cold corporate efficiency in Wilson Chin’s scenic design, with gleaming vending machines and flimsy chairs — there’s a mounted TV set, usually tuned to “Hobby Lobby TV.” The volume is, with purposeful exceptions, kept to a low but insistent drone as the two hosts babble on, perhaps trying to subliminally motivate the employees. Occasionally, they’re interrupted by gruesome images of surgical procedures.One can’t help but suspect it was this kind of creepy banality that led Will to seek fulfillment in the place he’s now escaping: an evangelical church that has grown notorious as the result of a scandalous tragedy. To what extent Will was involved is in question; though he describes his position at the church at one point as that of merely a “bookkeeper and janitor,” he later expresses beliefs and, eventually, guilt that suggest a deeper role.Notably, Will remains convinced of, or at least fascinated by, the theory commonly known as the rapture: that the end of the world is approaching, but true believers will be rescued and united with Jesus Christ. Experience has nonetheless left Will conflicted; he is asked, by two characters on separate occasions, why he still even believes in God, and at first responds, “You’ll see.” His second answer is more specific, and wrenching: “Because without God, then all I am is a terrible father who works at a Hobby Lobby and lives in his car.” Peter Mark Kendall’s beautifully shaded performance as Will captures these contradictions, so that we see how a man seeking virtue and truth can be drawn to extremes, and get a full view of the instincts and emotions at war within this seemingly gentle, unassuming person. Director Oliver Butler culls similarly sensitive, potent performances from the other cast members, among them Anna Baryshnikov as a sweetly goofy, painfully insecure co-worker who finds herself attracted to Will, and Ignacio Diaz-Silverio as a troubled teenager who gradually forges a bond with him.More specific details linking Will to the teen are revealed early on, but it would be a shame to ruin any of the engaging twists that inform this play. Suffice it to say that, like other relationships in “A Brand New Boise,” theirs is developed with the hard-cutting but uncynical wisdom and sheer grace that continue to make Mr. Hunter a uniquely compelling playwright.

Searching for Answers in ‘A Bright New Boise’

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