Samuel D. Hunter’s Prodigal Son in GRANGEVILLE — Review

If the story of Grangeville is not entirely novel, it is made engaging by playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s nonpareil knack for allowing his characters' loneliest, most existential undercurrents to surface through dialogue alternately cagey and betraying. Once again he returns to his home state of Idaho, this time as a crashing interruption for the chic, gay life of Arnold (Brian J. Smith). An American artist living in Amsterdam, his mother’s impending death back home means having to hash out morbid details with his half-brother, Jerry (Paul Sparks), from across the pond. Arnold is estranged from his family and roots, more or less by design – he is as resentful of Jerry’s casual homophobia growing up as he is of his decision to stay and look after their neglectful mother – and their conversations in this two-hander are appropriately fraught.

The idea is almost certainly to read Arnold as a stand-in for Hunter, which careens the play into  a simplistic territory somewhere between therapy art and liberal exposé on America’s heartland. “It’s like he’s taken the worst parts of me, and he’s just decided that it’s all that I am,” Jerry complains to his wife, played in one scene by Smith. But the autobiography also gets it back on track, in the scene immediately following, where Arnold’s partner is introduced and Hunter excoriates both his own romantic self, as well as that profitable fixation on red state armchair analysis on which the artist has built his career. (Though both actors are excellent, Sparks, who wobbles a bit with the initially caricaturish Jerry, truly becomes another character as Arnold’s partner.)

It’s a risky gamble, facing himself so nakedly at the nadir of the play’s navel-gazing, but one which Hunter skillfully (and more than a little humorously) pulls off, then pulls the plug on indulgence and concludes the story. Director Jack Serio (and Theatrely31 alum), at home in an intimate production, largely keeps the duo on opposite sides of the stage, filling the bare set (by dots) not so much with movement, but with a charged, hesitant air, made haunting by the slight crackling of phone calls (by Christopher Darbassie) and the noirish light (by Stacey Derosier). This might be a more accessible, and more easily categorizable, work by Hunter, but down to its last production and performance detail, it carries his indelible sense of soulful shadows.

‍Grangeville is in performance through March 23, 2025 at the Signature Center on West 42nd Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.