Samuel D. Hunter's 'Little Bear Ridge Road' proves real people aren't always desperately doing things

By Matthew Wexler

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter hears voices in his head. Or at least that’s one way to explain his searingly specific new play, Little Bear Ridge Road, opening on Broadway with the same cast that premiered the work at Steppenwolf in 2024.

Hunter, who also penned The Whale (which won Brendan Fraser an Academy Award), specifies dialogue that’s emphatic, deliberate, and impulsive, where characters trail off and overlap like real conversation. Director Joe Mantello conducts this verbal symphony as 30-something Ethan (Micah Stock) returns to Troy, Idaho, to settle his father’s estate and reconnect with his estranged aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Micah Stock, Laurie Metcalf, and John Drea in "Little Bear Ridge Road." — Micah Stock, Laurie Metcalf, and John Drea in “Little Bear Ridge Road.” Photo by Julieta Cervantes.

The masks come off quickly, both literally and figuratively, as the pair tiptoes around the long-lasting impact of the deceased’s meth addiction and the trauma it inflicted on them both. This includes the emotional ghosts from an urgent and unanswered plea for help from young Ethan, and Sarah’s own mortality as she faces metastasized colon cancer.

Little Bear Ridge Road’s melancholy softens with the introduction of graduate student James (John Drea), a potential hookup that evolves into dating despite Ethan’s curmudgeonly exterior. The unlikely threesome overlaps like a Venn diagram, its central point illuminated in the awkward, everyday language of people just trying to survive and communicate the best way they know how.

Sharing a TV obsession, Sarah bemoans complicated plots and episode recaps to Ethan, suggesting, “Real people aren’t always desperately doing things.” It’s a meta moment in Hunter’s script, which is uncompromising in its intimacy. Metcalf and Stock will both likely earn well-deserved Tony Award nominations as they carve out a kind of rarely seen stage chemistry rooted in uncomfortable, everyday familiarity.

Played on a bare stage, save a reclining console couch with reequiste cup holders, there’s no place else for these characters to go except toward each other.

Fast facts: ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’

Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock earn their Tony buzz in Little Bear Ridge Road, an intimate family drama about the ghosts we live with and the words we can’t say.