Review: Rude t-shirts and rude awakenings in 'A Bright New Boise'

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, March 28, 2024


Review: Rude t-shirts and rude awakenings in 'A Bright New Boise'
From left, Angus O’Brien, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio and Peter Mark Kendall in a revival of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise” is at the Signature Theater in New York, Jan. 29, 2023. An early play by Samuel D. Hunter finds the author developing his voice by lending it to the lost souls working at an Idaho Hobby Lobby. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

by Jesse Green



NEW YORK, NY.- For most who attempt it professionally, playwriting is a hopeless job, with few opportunities to break in and fewer to advance. So it’s a pleasing irony that playwright Samuel D. Hunter, the reigning bard of American economic dead-endism, has managed such a vibrant career.

His trophy case is crowded with prizes: Obie, Whiting, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, MacArthur. The film adaptation of his 2012 play “The Whale” is up for three Academy Awards at next month’s ceremony. Even more impressive is that, at just 42, he’s had 11 New York City stage premieres in 12 years, from the jumbly satire of “Jack’s Precious Moment,” his local debut in 2010, to the sublime heartbreak of “A Case for the Existence of God” in 2022.

“A Bright New Boise,” also from 2010, was the first of Hunter’s plays to achieve widespread notice, and with good reason. It introduced the radical sympathy of his voice and the quietly despairing people who evoked it. These were characters that few playwrights paid attention to: low-wage earners, many working at local branches of national chains, mostly in Hunter’s native Idaho. They struggle with the fallout of economic devastation and the emotional kind so tied up with it. Searching for faith, they must face its insufficiency.

So interpret with caution the title of “A Bright New Boise,” which opened Tuesday in a taut Signature Theater revival directed by Oliver Butler. It takes place in the break room of a local Hobby Lobby, on a deadly accurate set by Wilson Chin featuring a malfunctioning microwave on the counter and soporific motivational programming on the closed-circuit television. That the programming is occasionally interrupted by surgery-cam videos — a scalpel probing an ear is how this production begins — baldly warns us that we are in for something deeper and more upsetting than mere corporate uplift can obscure.

The focus of that upset, we understand at once, is Will (Peter Mark Kendall), a man nearing 40 who is interviewing for a cashier’s position at $7.50 an hour. In 2010, when the play is set, that’s just 25 cents above the federal minimum wage, yet he accepts it willingly. Why?

The proud, efficient and bilious store manager, Pauline (Eva Kaminsky), is all business; her upswept hair is a pincushion of pens. But Will is clearly in some kind of trouble. He answers her questions haltingly, the holes in his speech and his resume suggesting the damaged places in his soul. When asked for an emergency contact, even one that “doesn’t have to be local,” he has none to provide.

A bit too methodically, Hunter introduces three of Will’s new co-workers, and here the play, though slightly revised since 2010, begins to betray some early-career awkwardness. One co-worker is Anna (Anna Baryshnikov), a skittery young woman drawn to Will in part because most of the men she meets “are pretty much terrible.” In Will she thinks she recognizes a kindred spirit; they both hide out at closing time — she among the silk flowers; he in scrapbooking — so they can spend evenings reading and writing in the break room.

But even though Anna has real grit and sadness to her, she feels peripheral to the deepest currents of the story: a shore bird, not a fish. So, too, is Leroy (Angus O’Brien), a bro-y Master of Fine Arts candidate at Boise State who makes T-shirts featuring aggressive phrases like “You will eat your children” and wears them to work as performance art. (The costumes are by April M. Hickman.) Although it’s Leroy who precipitates the play’s crisis by uncovering Will’s past, the comic and tensioning purposes to which he’s put don’t blend, making him more of a convenience than a character.




Only the third co-worker, Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), is as central to Will’s story as he is to his own. To say how would be to spoil the plot, but Alex is quite a creation: a sullen high school student who has panic attacks, listens to Villa-Lobos on his iPod and is looking for something — in life as in himself — that isn’t a lie or a letdown. When we learn that Will is suffering a terrible disappointment of his own, a disastrous evangelical past he’s trying to shed, we see the crash coming.

It’s a mark of Hunter’s patient construction that these Big Issues are usually rooted deeply in the plot, not sprinkled on top of it. In one of the play’s best scenes, Alex, freaking out over a $187 discrepancy Pauline has discovered in his register receipts from the previous day, allows Will to help him search the receipt rolls for the error. There’s no obvious reason that such a dull project — it takes several minutes — should make dangerous, believable, feelingful theater but it does.

Actually, the believable part is no mystery; Hunter’s first job was at a Walmart in Moscow, Idaho. Nor is the dangerous part really so surprising: As a teenager Hunter attended an evangelical school for more than four years. He writes about the intensity of fellowship offered by charismatic leaders as vividly as he does the threat to individuality that comes with it. For Will, who came of age in that world, mainstream churches are little more than Hobby Lobbys — national chains selling discount goods.

That he engages your sympathy instead of (or along with) your repulsion is the essence of Hunter’s gift. It’s a gift not just of human connection, but of theatrical compaction, a nuclear pressure he applies to people in distress. In that, “A Bright New Boise” anticipates the more sophisticated dramaturgy of his more recent plays, which less and less require extra characters. “A Case for the Existence of God” has only two until its coda.

But “A Bright New Boise” sprawls. Despite Butler’s swift and confident staging and the fine work of the cast — and the hilariously corporate lighting, sound and video design — the play sometimes seems like a game of marbles, its five characters, each energized by trouble, banging up against one another in patterns that seem both random and overdetermined.

It’s still a compelling play, worth seeing in itself and as a map of what would follow. Also as a map of what didn’t. When Leroy, explaining the philosophy behind his T-shirts, says he’s “forcing people to confront words and images they normally avoid,” you hear him ventriloquizing for Hunter. In a short time, though, the confrontations became invitations, and the T-shirts great theater.



‘A Bright New Boise’

Through March 12 at Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

February 23, 2023

Joan Mitchell Foundation contends Vuitton ads infringe on painter's copyright

We regret the fossil error. It wasn't the first.

Yoko Ono at 90

Masterwork by Rubens to star in Sotheby's Modern Evening Sale this May

Bozar opens an exhibition with works by Swedish artists who are inspired by the spiritual and the occult

Meadows Museum press preview for "In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art"

Looted artifacts, returned to Yemen, will go to the Smithsonian, for now

Exhibition in honour of late north-east artist Sally Madge

Gillian Jason Gallery opens an exhibition of works by Julia Bennett and Mizuki Nishiyama

Pirelli HangarBicocca presents "NOw/here" by Gian Maria Tosatti

"Our Own Work, Our Own Way: Ascendant Women Artists in the Johnson Collection" at CMA

The Dayton Art Institute announces Mariah Postlewait as Kettering Curator of Photography and Special Projects

Tim Whiten awarded the 2022 Gershon Iskowitz Prize

Jack Shainman Gallery open their first solo exhibition of works by Rose B. Simpson

'Parade' producers condemn neo-Nazi protest at show about antisemitism

Review: Rude t-shirts and rude awakenings in 'A Bright New Boise'

Iris DeMent is worried about the world. So she made another album.

Gustavo Dudamel, superstar maestro, meets New York

"Shona McAndrew: Rose-Tinted Glasses" opens today at CHART Gallery

Berggruen Gallery opens an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Christopher Brown

Betts Project opens the second solo exhibition at the gallery by British architect Sam Jacob

The Met Opera's new season: What we want to see

Laurie Metcalf to return to Broadway in a horror story, 'Grey House'

How To Overcome the Same-Day Delivery Challenge Through Inventory Management

Dental SEO Australia: The Ultimate Solution for Dentists to Boost their Online Presence

Discover the Latest Subdivisions in Christchurch with Sections for Sale

Massive Bonuses to Enjoy on Vegas7 Games

Top 5 Milky Way Fish Games to Play Online

To Make Your Life Easier, Try Some Fantastic Kitchen Accessories.

6 Innovative Ways to Cultivate Artistic Skills in Children

The Ten Don'ts of Online Reputation Management for Business

Your Guide to the Short North Gallery Hop in Columbus, Ohio




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

sa gaming free credit
Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful