“Grangeville” at Signature Theatre (Photo: Emilio Madrid)

To paraphrase Philip Larkin, they fuck you up, your mum and – older brother. In Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville, his new play in its premiere production at Signature Theatre, Arnold (Brian J. Smith) has escaped the titular Idaho town and, he hopes, any connection to his family. But putting an ocean between his past and present can’t fully sever the link. As his mother’s health deteriorates, he is drawn back by his half-brother, Jerry (Paul Sparks), and submerged in the trauma he has been trying to suppress.

Hunter’s two-hander shares some DNA with his 2022 masterpiece A Case for the Existence of God, a Signature premiere that topped many best-of lists for that year, including my own. Both are intimate plays about a pair of men seeking understanding from each other and both feature a moment where those two actors then play two different characters.

Grangeville carries the expectation of Existence of God’s success on its back, but it’s a smaller, less ambitious play. Grangeville is about the lived experience of childhood and how it can be hard to grow up, mature, and change and still feel like you did as a little kid when back inside your family dynamic. It’s clear from Arnold’s stunted adulthood – his failing relationship with his husband, his lackluster career – that his brother’s abuse and the neglect he experienced from his mother continue to sow seeds of doubt about his worthiness. He’s baldly, vociferously, against returning to Idaho, against getting involved in his mother’s affairs, and against letting his brother in.

Because Jerry is in Grangeville and Arnold lives in Rotterdam, most of the play consists of phone calls and video chats, a conceit that quickly grows tired despite the best efforts of director Jack Serio’s staging and Stacey Derosier’s geometric lighting. There’s not enough in phone call after phone call to hang the play on and the brothers’ personal disconnection adds an additional layer of distancing beyond their physical bifurcation. Smith and Sparks are blocked from generating any chemistry, even of the negative variety, since Arnold sort of hates his brother. Instead, there’s just a lot of yelling and frustration down the end of an internet line.

In a pair of scenes in the center of the play, Smith becomes Jerry’s estranged wife Stacey and Sparks becomes Arnold’s estranged husband Bram. Here, the actors make eye contact and share the same space and the play briefly comes alive. Hunter writes fantastic scenes. He knows how to get his characters talking, how to shape a conversation, and how to tell us about them through the things they express to each other. In A Case for the Existence of God, that kind of person-to-person intimacy and the thrilling, deeply felt acting is what made the play ascend. In Grangeville, these two scenes give us but a glimpse of that. 

Serio’s knack for wringing emotion in tiny playing spaces is a good fit for the small scale of Hunter’s play, even if Signature’s Griffin Theatre is a larger space than Serio’s recent work has occupied. In a Brutalist box from scenic designers dots, the two actors are shoved forward toward the audience, the chilliness of the black concrete both an ode to Arnold’s European artist lifestyle and the stark, bare state of the brothers’ relationship. The trailer door puncturing the wall is Arnold’s past intruding on his present, an inescapable memory and a constant call to come back.

And he does, even if he really doesn’t want to. When the brothers eventually, in the final scene of the play, meet again face to face, it somehow lacks the impact we’re waiting for. The play wants us to sympathize with Arnold and, even though we have seen Jerry apologize for how he treated his brother when they were younger and attempt to explain his behavior, Arnold is still holding a grudge. As a result, so are we. 

Jerry can’t erase the abuse he inflicted on Arnold as children, it’s only up to Arnold to forgive. They tussle and smash through their physicalized memories in an elevated coffin-kitchen that appears behind the concrete wall once their mother has passed. After so much yelling on the phone, it’s no wonder they come to blows. There’s not so much resolution as resignation. They’re stuck with each other. Oh well.

“Man hands on misery to man,” as Philip Larkin says. Jerry’s pain is secondary to Arnold’s, but it’s still there. The play only touches the surface of either brother’s buried trauma, but prefers to offer a broader statement. Everyone’s got baggage, but how does each person process it? For Arnold and Jerry, it’s less than productive.