“A Bright New Boise” at Signature Theatre (Photo: Joan Marcus)

For many of us who labor in the trenches of New York theatre criticism, a new play by Samuel D. Hunter is eagerly awaited. Last year’s A Case for the Existence of God topped my list of the best plays I saw in 2022 and his string of works leading up to it (Greater Clements, Lewiston/Clarkston, The Harvest) all had a strong emotional impact on me. 

Over the past few months, though, we’ve been presented with two opportunities to look back on Hunter’s earlier work and they haven’t been as successful. The film adaptation of Hunter’s play The Whale was met with resistance to its depiction of the central character’s weight and how the filmmakers view him. (In my opinion, that’s not Hunter’s doing, that’s how the director, Darren Aronofsky, sees the character, but this is not a review of The Whale.) Now, with Signature Theatre’s revival of his 2010 play, A Bright New Boise, a play that predates even The Whale takes center stage and feels like a missive from another time.

It’s to be expected. I would hope a playwright grows with each successive work, expanding their craft, pushing at boundaries. Hunter’s done that. He wasn’t even thirty when A Bright New Boise first opened and it feels like a young man’s play. There’s little invention in the scene structure, characters erupt out of nowhere, the female characters are shallow. It’s like a time capsule: this is what plays were like in 2010, remember that? 

But he is also laying the foundation for the Sam Hunter Universe that still exists in his work. The New Life Fellowship mentioned here is the same church that triggers the action in The Whale. The trauma of religion carries over into any number (maybe all!) of his plays. Hunter is populating his fictional version of Idaho with each character he creates and the employees of this Boise Hobby Lobby are some of its first residents. 

Peter Mark Kendall plays Will, a former member of New Life, who arrives at the Hobby Lobby to reconnect with his son, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), who works in the store. Alex doesn’t know his father; he was put up for adoption at a young age. He’s an aspiring musician and the store’s best cashier, but he’s also prone to threatening suicide, half-jokingly/half-seriously. 

Of the male characters, Alex feels the most like a relic from playwriting past. He’s vaguely “emo,” he writes raps about capitalism, he has debilitating panic attacks. It’s not that he’s less fully realized or that Diaz-Silverio is not convincing in the part–he is. It’s that the collection of traits that comprise his character feel like things we’ve moved beyond. Employing panic attacks to create sympathy for a character or to illustrate a character’s fragility feels hackneyed in 2023. His spoken word screed elicited a few chuckles, but I can imagine it played differently twelve-plus years ago. 

The play and the current production are set in 2010, but aside from a general lack of cell phone use and a plot device that hinges on an Ethernet cable, it could be now. As far away as 2010 feels, it’s not long enough to make the play feel like a “period piece.” Wilson Chin’s set and April M. Hickman’s costumes strike a sort of timeless balance between then and now, but the elements of the writing that don’t feel contemporary stand out even more. As we get further from 2010 and the play ages, it might actually come around to working again. If these 2010 characters exist in an environment vastly different from our own, maybe their behaviors will make more sense, like when we see plays from the ‘80s or ‘90s today. 

Kendall is delivering a powerhouse performance, though. He’s usually cast as teenagers or younger adults, so it was momentarily jarring when Will revealed that he is thirty-nine years old. But it’s a welcome transition to another kind of role. Kendall has a presence that is impossible to pin down–you never know what he’s thinking, yet there’s so much going on. Will can be gentle and kind with Alex, but there’s also an air of menace that hovers over him. Hunter, Kendall, and director Oliver Butler never let us settle on how we should feel about Will. We’re still wondering even as the play concludes and that’s what makes it a worthwhile piece of theatre. He’s ambiguous in a way the other characters are not. In a world of black and white, he’s a washed out gray that may once have even been blue. There is a momentary, terrifying slip of the facade in the play’s final scene that then vanishes almost immediately. Kendall carries the weight of everything that happened to Will before the play like a bunch of bricks in his soul. 

Butler’s production is characteristically smart. The staging is always telling us more about the characters than they’re saying verbally. Butler’s strengths lie in simplicity and in focusing the play and he has that locked down in spades. Jen Schriever’s lighting manages to be exciting in a mundane retail store break room. She amplifies the exit sign with additional red light that might be the portal to hell. Christopher Darbassie’s sound design vacillates between amusing and unnerving within the same moment. The inane chatter of Hobby Lobby TV playing in the background can become something much more sinister with a shift in the sound. 

Listen, even a dated Samuel D. Hunter play is still worth your time. It was at least fascinating to get a glimpse of who he was as a writer when he was starting out and compare that to his newest play, which was on the same stage eight months ago. His evolution is vast, but there are threads weaving through. I’m hopeful that he’ll only get better and that we’ll have plenty more opportunities to appreciate and to reexamine his work.