Samuel D. Hunter follows his extraordinary 2022 two-hander A Case for the Existence of God with a another astonishing new drama for two actors. This time, two men must calibrate the spaces between introspection and explosive anger as they come to terms with past trauma. Grangeville, which opened Monday at SignatureTheatre, centers on two long-estranged half-brothers who reconnect as their harridan of a mother is bed-ridden with a stroke and nearing death.
The older sibling, fiftysomething Jerry (Paul Sparks), has moved back into the dilapidated Idaho trailer home where they grew up, to better care for a woman whom we never actually see but who lacked any sort of maternal instinct as she cycled through abusive husbands and retreated to the bottle. Meanwhile, fortysomething Arnold (Brian J. Smith) is a once-promising graphic artist who’s settled in the Netherlands with his museum-executive husband. He’s still stewing over the homophobic assaults he endured back home as a boy — including physical and verbal attacks by Jerry and his own mother. Arnie is understandably reluctant to be drawn back into the orbit of his volatile family, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a gravitational pull there that’s due in part to the fact he’s never really processed his feelings or found a way to move beyond them.
As played by Sparks with remarkable subtlety, Jerry defies our expectations of the rural good ol’ boy. He’s a computer illiterate who first seeks out Arnie for his help managing mom’s insurance forms, but he soon reveals considerably more depth. For starters, he seems genuinely interested in self-analysis — he’s in therapy, he admits early on — and wants to make some kind of amends with the brother he wronged all those years ago. Still, he can’t help but soft-pedal his own culpability in bullying Arnold (“I was just trying to toughen him up”) and to inflate the times when his more caring side shown through. “There were plenty of nights my buddies would be out drinking but I’d be in the trailer with Arnie playing cards. Letting him win,” he tells his wife at one point. “I just wish he could remember that stuff, too.”
Sparks delivers his lines with a hesitant, countrified drawl and projects the sense of a man who wants to do better but is stumped about the best way to go about it. For his part, Smith brings a compelling woundedness to Arnie, a man whose emotional development seemed to freeze after he managed to escape his troubled upbringing. Both men seemed trapped by their traumatic histories and, as we soon learn, both are struggling to maintain their long-time marriages. Sparks and Smith also double up as the siblings’ estranged spouses in short scenes that add new layers to their characterizations. Sparks has the easier time of it, giving Arnie’s partner, Bram, a Dutch accent and Teutonic rationality, while Smith struggles a bit as Jerry’s wife, Stacey, though he manages to avoid obvious feminine stereotypes or a put-on fey voice.
Both spouses project a competence and an emotional maturity that the brothers lack. They’re able to set boundaries for themselves and to call out their partner on his shortcomings and self-delusions. Stacey, who improbably has been reading about medieval history in her book club, cuts to the heart of the matter in her conversation. “We can’t be sitting around waiting for the world to reward us or forgive us or even give us a reason for all of it,” she tells Jerry. “So all the shit we’ve been through, all the shit that we’ve done, or that other people have done to us, it doesn’t have to mean anything.” It’s in exchanges like this one that Hunter’s writing really shines. He has a real flair for naturalistic dialogue that has a philosophical depth floating just beneath the surface.
Director Jack Serio underscores the isolation of his characters in the show’s visual design, with Stacey Derosier creating shards of light for the actors to retreat to, like boxers between rounds, on the dark stucco-walled set (designed by the collective dots). The final scene leaves this liminal space for a more concrete, realistic one where Jerry and Arnie can finally connect in person. It’s a reunion of excruciating awkwardness, at once visceral and cerebral, high-minded and absurd. And it brings Grangeville to a moment of understated catharsis that is both satisfying and authentic. They may not achieve understanding, or reconciliation, but they come close to a state of being that is just as elusive: grace. ★★★★☆
GRANGEVILLE
Signature Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 95 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 23 (tickets from $69-$177)
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