In my travels I’ve visited 23 of our United States, but never Idaho. A quick search reveals its nickname: the Gem State, and a population that’s one-quarter that of New York City. To be frank, a flight to Boise probably won’t be necessary; Samuel D. Hunter has taken me there so many times. Over the past 15 years, the prolific and consistently affecting playwright has mined his home territory more diligently than a 19th-century quartz driller (Gem State, remember?). Thanks to Hunter, I’ve spent hours in Pocatello, Lewiston, Clarkston (all titles of his) and, most recently, Grangeville. Or rather, Grangeville, a world premiere by the Signature Theatre Company in which the writer continues his patient and absorbing study of squandered lives.
A two-hander about estranged half-brothers with a dying mother, Grangeville begins in darkness. Director Jack Serio eases us into a tentative transatlantic call between Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith), visible finally after a glacial fade up. Jerry is older by ten years, divorced, still living in Idaho, squatting in their mom’s trailer home as she dwindles in the hospital. Arnold escaped. He lives in Rotterdam, painting, and his Dutch husband, Bram, works at a museum. As Jerry and Arnold reconnect haltingly on the phone (sound designer Chris Darbassie amplifies and distorts their voices, coating them with a sour tinniness), a painful history gathers in the air. Arnold refuses to be dragged back to a past in which Jerry bullied his suspected gay brother, and their neglectful mom went out on benders.
As mentioned, the opening is a long fade up. The remaining 80 minutes move the siblings closer to each other over several months. They start meeting on video chat, open up about problems with their partners, Arnold learns with bitter outrage that his mother gave him power of attorney (“one last middle finger before she dies,” he fumes). Over video, Arnold shows Jerry his latest work: abstract painting, following an earlier phase of constructing meticulous dioramas of locations in Grangeville. We intuit that those little 3D picture boxes were Arnold’s way of compartmentalizing and containing rage at his despised origins.
Neatly, Arnold’s shift from miniaturized realism to abstraction is reverse engineered in Serio’s beautifully calibrated production. We begin in inky blackness and end in a photorealistic human space. Throughout, impeccable design supports this trajectory, visually pleasing and dramaturgically apt. The scenery trio known as “dots” does it again: for most of the play we’re looking at a broad wall with a pebbledash surface (that’s a bumpy, raised finish) painted deep black. To the left is the cheap, flimsy door to the mother’s trailer, and at right is a hallway leading off. (This is the “void and liminal space” denoted in the script.) The way that Stacey Derosier’s lights play off the roughcast wall can create the illusion of glittering stars or an impenetrable void. Ricky Reynoso’s costumes efficiently delineate Jerry’s lower middle class midwestern schlub (jeans, baseball cap) with Arnold’s more fashionable European artiste (unisex leisurewear). Toward the end, Serio places the actors in what is essentially a boxy upstage diorama—the kitchen of the trailer, with the brothers dumping her belongings into garbage bags. Arnold turned his back on the bonsai realism of his early career, but it has sucked him back.
While the design team does much dramaturgical lifting, the acting is equally superb. Just when you think you’ve seen every vocal twang or behavioral quirk from the longtime secret weapon Paul Sparks, he whips up another virtuosic portrait of a damaged, complicated weirdo (they tend to be more country than urban). Last seen tearing down an existential highway with Michael Shannon in an energizing Waiting for Godot), Sparks has elevated every project he’s in for more than 20 years. He can whip from dead-eyed serial killer to wheedling man-boy in seconds. His Jerry is a remorseful loser, aware that his sadism (passed down from an abusive dad) pushed his brother an ocean away, and he must atone. Smith task is both more delicate and more brutal. He attracts our empathy as a cultured, thoughtful survivor of poverty and homophobia, but when he gets the inevitable news of his mother’s death, his triumphant glee is unbearably ugly. Best of all, both actors get to double in scenes at the center of the play: Smith portrays Jerry’s wary, sensible ex-wife, and Sparks transforms into Arnold’s long-suffering, dryly funny husband.
Have we seen this play before—siblings dealing with the wounds of the past, freshly ripped open by the death of a parent? Sure we have. But as in all good storytelling, it’s rarely the what but the how that matters. How painfully gorgeous this two-step is, how well all the artists approach the task of achieving clarity and honesty in every moment through vibrant acting, poetic design and soul-stirring storytelling. You’ll leave the town of Grangeville (pop. 3,617) spent but satisfied. And yes, if Hunter announces another tour to the 43rd state, sign me up.
Grangeville | 1hr 30mins. No intermission. | Pershing Square Signature Center | 480 West 42nd Street | 212-244-7529 | Buy Tickets Here
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