Little Bear Ridge Road Playwright Samuel D. Hunter on Laurie Metcalf, Anti-Theatricality and Anaphylactic Shock

Playwright Samuel D. Hunter's new Broadway offering Little Bear Ridge Road stars two-time Tony winner Laurie Metcalf and Tony nominee Micah Stock as an estranged aunt and nephew thrust back into each other’s lives when tasked with selling a crumbling family estate in Idaho. Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens sat down with Hunter to discuss the inspiration behind his latest work, collaborating with Metcalf and Stock and finding hope in the mundane.

Much of the play involves the characters watching TV, a deceptively passive activity that yields moments of dramatic gravitas and rupture. “There's just something about these deeply anti-theatrical ideas, that if you can theatricalize them, they kind of feel huge and they feel like they can contain so much,” Hunter says of the contradiction. The impetus for this play came when Hunter was driving near Providence, Rhode Island with his husband and daughter. “I saw a billboard for something called Cozy TV and it's this TV channel that plays all the old classics, like Green Acres and Mary Tyler Moore. It made me a little sad. I don't know why, it just kind of felt like TV as anesthesia and it made me start thinking about a theatrical way of talking about people watching television. Very shortly after that, the pandemic hit and we all retreated to our screens.”

As a piece of theater set during the pandemic, Hunter considers it “a reflection of my experience of that time, to a certain degree.” The play is minimal by design, stipulating a “couch and a void” as its sole backdrop. His dialogue is similarly lacking in grandiosity. “When I'm encountering a play and the characters are declaiming and speaking in paragraphs and metaphors and poetry and bounding around the stage, I just power down. It's really hard for me. It starts feeling less like a play to me and more like a pageant or something. I realized the plays that I was really responding to were plays that were deeply human and took their time. Plays that allowed actors to have breathing room and space to make it their own.”

His focus on actors is well matched for Metcalf, who personally sought out Hunter to develop work with her and two-time Tony winning director Joe Mantello. Little Bear Ridge Road marks Mantello's seventh collaboration with Metcalf. “I love being in a rehearsal room with her," Hunter says. "I love giving her new lines to try out. I love seeing what she can do with a line to just activate it in a way that I wasn't expecting.” He also praises both Stock and Metcalf's ability to “[fill] out the negative space” of the play.

Hunter’s work has given actors the opportunity to reach new heights, as was the case when the 2022 film adaptation of his drama The Whale earned Brendan Fraser an Oscar. In spite of Fraser’s win, Hunter’s Oscar night was not entirely blissful. “It was so amazing and so great, and then I went into anaphylactic shock and went to the hospital.” He goes on to detail the after-party mishap that resulted in his hospitalization: "I'm in this tux and with my husband, we're all over the moon. My husband wants to go to the dessert table. They offer something to me. I say, ‘No, no, no, I'm very allergic to nuts,’ and they said, ‘You're in luck. There's no nuts anywhere.’ So I ate one thing and was rushed to Cedars-Sinai and was there until 2 a.m.”

A bait and switch of this nature mirrors Hunter’s writing where “there'll be a big laugh line and then three seconds later there will be one of the more tragic moments of the play. That's my experience of the world. People laugh at funerals.” Reflecting on the character arcs in Little Bear Ridge Road, he says, “I think they finally figure out how to save one another, not in huge heroic ways, but in small ways that give meaning to both of them. So it's really a play about people.”

Though Hunter’s work is unflinching in its exploration of human connection and alienation, there is always a glint of optimism. “All of my plays do have that sense of hard-won hope,” he says, before adding, “hard-won being the very strict qualifier.”

Watch the full interview below.

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