REALITY SHOW

"Little Bear Ridge Road" comes to Broadway.

- BY HELEN SHAW

Samuel D. Hunter's “Little Bear Ridge Road,” directed by Joe Mantello at the Booth, on Broadway, is a small, quiet drama set in a large, quiet corner of the country. We're somewhere in rural Idaho, far from light pollution and the people who cause it—and, even if you've never been up among the Idaho buttes, this vision of a dark, empty world may feel familiar. Hunter conceived much of “Little Bear Ridge Road” during the pandemic, and the show’s vast stillness, more than the actors in masks brandishing sanitizing wipes, evokes that isolating era.

It’s 2020, and Ethan (Micah Stock) has come back home to sell his late father’s house. Ethan can't grieve, exactly; the two hadn't spoken in years, their relationship shattered by his father’s decades of drug use. But Ethan is nonetheless adrift: he’s left an abusive boyfriend in Seattle, and his plans to be a writer have come to nothing. When he drives up the remote Little Bear Ridge Road to check in with his estranged aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), she brusquely installs him in her guest room. Two COVID years then come and go in odd hops and skips, the passing months registered by the undulating stream of television shows they watch together. (Hunter captures how slippery time felt in that period—infinity measured out in season finales.)