Theater Review: Exciting Drama from America’s Heartland

Lewiston/Clarkston

Written by Samuel D. Hunter

Directed by Davis McCallum

Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater, Manhattan

October 28, 2018

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter (b. 1981) is an Idaho explant now resident in NYC. His award winning The Whale and many of his other plays are personal dramas set in Idaho or similar Western locales. His keen eye for rural people and intergenerational conflict is timely in our re-examination of city vs. country in the Trump era. The small scale plays (3 characters each) Lewiston and Clarkston (2015-16) were presented together in gripping productions off Broadway this fall. Each play was 70-80 minutes long, and there was a “communal dinner” in between (an odd folksy juxtaposition of Manhattanites, either eating BBQ or tofu!). The setting was really great; the regular theater was gutted to create a bleak, small church auditorium with shabby furnishings, folding chairs, and stacked Costco boxes of Cheesy Poofs all around…we could have been anywhere in a hard-up community in rural US, but were actually in the trendy West Village in close proximity to the action. 

I love it when producers pick a performance site that amplifies the drama. The names of the plays connote several meanings. Literally, these are the two towns in which the plays are set. The towns are (in fact) across the Snake River from each other, one in Washington, the other in Idaho. Each has 7,000-20,000 residents, and each survives on light industry and working-class jobs. The other name reference is to Lewis and Clark, the US explorers who stopped near here on the way to the Pacific, seeking the source of the Colombia river. These are referenced during both plays, as a couple of the characters are distant relatives of the explorers. The metaphor allows the playwright to compare these young peoples’ dissatisfaction or stuck-ness with the explorers’ ambition and often-insane risk taking. Each play focuses on a dissatisfied millennial seeking some sort of escape or spiritual center in these humdrum towns. In the first play Lewiston, a young woman, tired of “urban farming” in Seattle, backpacks into her Idaho birthplace to try to convince her flinty grandma to not sell the family property. The two are oil and water, and the play’s focus is how each one misreads and judges the other. Family does end up winning out, to a degree, but the playwright is not a sentimentalist, and reality is always nearby. There’s a not-so-revealing subplot involving grandma’s live-in guy, who it turns out is just camping there while trying to be a gay man in a small town. The shabby fireworks stand that is grandma’s source of income is a nice metaphor for American values gone to seed. 

The play might seem a bit insubstantial if it were not a lead in for the more visceral Clarkston. Here, another wandering millennial (funny Noah Robbins), here a frail, nudgy post-colonial gender studies major from Bennington College (!), flees his secure east coast roots and runs out of gas in Clarkston, where he takes a job in the Costco working stocking shelves with the hunky blonde local guy (a terrific Edmund Donovan). This is a wonderful play, where the playwright does not allow us to fall into predictable stereotypes. Urban X talks a good line, but is neurotic and shallow, while rural gay repressed Y doesn’t talk much, but is deep, as we gradually find out. The playwright interweaves themes of urban torpor, depression, millennial angst, and coached optimism in a subtle and complex way. For example, the easterner is a very open gay young man, but neurotic about actual sex, while the Idahoan is repressed and closeted about his homosexuality, but very willing to have gay sex. From some personal family experience, this rural character rang quite true, as did his slow-cadenced speech that often hides deeper pain and meaning in platitudes and cynicism. The two end up being a complex, loving, and somewhat inscrutable pair. 

Overlying all this (and the first play too) is death, most overtly in X’s fatal neurodegenerative diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease, and in constant references to suicides, overdoses, etc. This gives these two 3-character rural dramas a Shakespearean/O’Neill-like gravitas strikingly at odds with the Costco merchandise-laden set. I admire the playwright's refusal to resort to melodrama. His dialogue is understated, and he has a way of setting us up for a big climax (e.g. the two boys, like Lewis and Clark, together finally seeing the Pacific ocean, each for the first time) then having it not amount to all that much, much as occurs in life. Finding tragedy in average America is hardly new to movies or theater, but this playwright does it with exceeding craft and guile. Neither play quite ended as I thought it would, and both made me reflect about life. See these plays if they come to your area!