Partial Comfort Productions

A Bright New Boise

The New York Times/David Rooney/ September 21, 2010

Evangelical fervor thrives on depression, so it’s no surprise that America’s economic free fall and plummeting national morale have coincided with a sharp rise in religious crusading. (Koran burning, anyone?) With no solution to his own or the world’s problems, the end-times believer at the center of “A Bright New Boise” simply chants, “Now, now, now,” in a prayer for deliverance.

Such bleak times foster desperate searches for meaning, a plight shared by all the characters in Samuel D. Hunter’s play, which starts out funny and steadily becomes more disquieting as its existential questions are amplified.

Directed with a firm hand by Davis McCallum and designed with pinpoint accuracy by Jason Simms, the production comes to the Wild Project, an increasingly interesting Lower East Side home for new work, from the resident collaborative ensemble Partial Comfort Productions, of which Mr. Hunter is a member.

The setting is the drably utilitarian staff break room of Hobby Lobby, a craft-supply chain store. Its single window provides a rectangular view of the hard edges and dismally cheery colors of the retail space — and the unaccommodating world — beyond. The specter of “corporate” also looms in the regulations by which Pauline (Danielle Slavick), the store manager, runs her not-so-tight ship.

Into this Boise blah-zone steps Will (Andrew Garman), who has fled his rural Idaho hometown after a scandalous tragedy at his nondenominational church. In a blunt introduction, he blurts out his hidden connection to Alex (Matt Farabee), a sullen teenage summer worker.

The setup is a reversal of David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” in which a young woman bursts into a sterile workplace to confront an older man with the sins of his past. As it develops, however, “Boise” takes a path more akin to those of comedies of intercolleague awkwardness, like “The Office” or, more specifically, “The Good Girl,” the 2002 movie about misfit workers in a tacky Texas department store.

But Mr. Hunter introduces darker themes. While Will seeks atonement, Alex wants to step out from behind his walls and belong. His protective foster-family brother, Leroy (John Patrick Doherty), aims to shock the world out of complacency with his profane T-shirt art. Pauline strives for order out of chaos, while the ditzy Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon), another employee, only wants a dramatic ending to the bland fiction she devours.

There are false notes, particularly from the female characters, but the five-member cast is uniformly strong and sympathetic.

Mr. Hunter undercuts the effectiveness of Will’s big confessional reveal by having him relate the circumstances of his disgrace to Alex in an earlier exchange, but nonetheless, there’s plenty to chew on here. And if the ending is anticlimactic, isn’t that in keeping with a doomsday scenario in which life just goes wearisomely on?

–

TheaterMania/Diane Snyder/September 16, 2010

Samuel D. Hunter has effectively rendered himself a playwright to watch with A Bright New Boise, at the Wild Project, a quietly affecting drama that delves into the always thorny issues of faith, forgiveness, and second chances with great eloquence and compassion. Moreover, director Davis McCallum and his eminently capable ensemble have created a world premiere production that pulses with electric performances that are as honest as a hard day’s work at minimum wage.
Those happen to be the sort of jobs Hunter’s characters hold, as employees of a craft superstore called Hobby Lobby. The newest hire, Will (Andrew Garman), leaves a couple of cloudy points off his application: that he’s the birth father of Alex (Matt Farabee), a high school student who also works at the Boise store, and that he was once a member of a Evangelical church/cult whose leader’s actions led to a young man’s death.

Will feels responsible for the tragedy, and he’s not the only one whose life has fallen into a spiritual black hole. High-strung Alex, who feels no connection to his foster parents, is at best guarded and at worst hostile to Will. Shy Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon), who hides in the store after closing to read books, finds companionship in the attractive, like-minded Will. Leroy (John Patrick Doherty), Alex’s prickly aspiring-artist foster brother and fellow coworker, takes a quick dislike to Will when he discovers his connection to the notorious church. Only Pauline (Danielle Slavick), the ever-so-efficient store manager, couldn’t care less who feels what about whom — as long as everything runs efficiently.

Hunter pushes his characters into dangerous emotional territory, but the playwright brings humanity and humility to his repressed characters as they struggle to connect and find a means of self-expression. In addition to Leroy, who creates anti-establishment T-shirts, Will uses his blog to express his religious convictions by writing a novel about the Rapture, while Alex pens angry songs and harbors performance artist ambitions. All of this unfurls gradually as the characters continue to surprise us.

McCallum takes his cast to beautifully nuanced heights, with Garman and Farabee especially affecting; Will’s gentleness and concern for his son stand in sharp contrast to Alex’s distraught rebelliousness. And it’s the little details that enhance the production, including Whitney Locher’s bureaucratically bright employee shirts, Jason Simms’ appropriately bland break room set (which creates some hilarious moments as characters exit or enter), Raquel Davis’ sharp lighting, and M. Florian Staab’s vivid sound design.

–

Lighting & Sound America/David Barbour/September 20, 2010

Samuel D. Hunter certainly knows how to open a play with a bang. A Bright New Boise begins amusingly enough in the break room of a Hobby Lobby, a giant crafts emporium. The middle-aged Will, who is shy and slightly evasive about his employment history, is being interviewed by Pauline, the store’s motor-mouthed manager. After he assures her that unions are a terrible idea, she hires him for 38 hours a week at $7.25 an hour — with a possible raise of 70 cents in nine months. As Pauline exits to prepare Will’s paperwork, in walks another employee, a sullen adolescent named Alex. Will makes several fumbling attempts at small talk with the young man, and then comes right out with it: “I’m your father. When you were born your name was William. You were named after me.”

Hunter also has a neat way of confounding audience expectations. Although Will’s pursuit of his long-lost son provides A Bright New Boisewith its dramatic spine, this is hardly a conventional domestic tearjerker. Instead, it’s a remarkably clear-eyed look at heartland America, here seen as an overbuilt landscape covered with big-box stores and fast-food joints where life is defined by the scramble to survive on the minimum wage. It’s hardly the land of the free: The employees inhabit a controlling corporate culture that amounts to socialism without the benefits. “Everything is hooked up to the corporate office,” says Pauline. “We can’t even turn the air conditioning on without calling South Carolina.” A television installed in the break room broadcasts company propaganda 24 hours a day — except when the store’s satellite dish malfunctions, transmitting instead the grisly details of eye and ear operations.

Will is the staff’s chief fish out of water, and not just because of his strange connection to Alex: He’s as Christ-haunted as any character out of Flannery O’Connor. Plagued by guilt over giving up his son, stuck in a series of dead-end jobs, he dedicated himself to a fundamentalist congregation focused on the End Times; however, the church dissolved in scandal when the pastor’s counseling efforts led directly to a young man’s death. Now the uprooted and desperately lonely Will strives to connect with Alex and his fellow employees; at night, he pours his heart out online, uploading installments of a novel that resembles the Left Behind series of best-selling Christian potboilers.

As Hunter makes clear, Will isn’t the only lost soul on staff. Alex is a classic example of the teenager as basket case; he has no friends, is a gifted liar, and is prone to crippling panic attacks. He’s also notably unimpressed with Will; “Do you at least drive a cool car or live in a big house?” he asks, witheringly. “It’s a ’94 Subaru. And right now, it’s also my house,” replies Alex. “You’d better not need a kidney,” the boy warns. Will also tangles with Leroy, Alex’s protective older brother, a would-be artist who shows up for work wearing T-shirts bearing all the popular four-letter obscenities. “Soccer moms and grade school kids and little old ladies, they all have to confront the reality of the words before they get their arts and crafts supplies,” he notes.

Will also has a halting flirtation with Anna, a winsome screwball who, having been fired from practically every store in town, is hanging on at the Hobby Lobby by her fingernails. They meet cute when both hide out in the break room after hours — he to work on his novel, she to get some peace and quiet from her large family. Things go well until Anna offers to bring him to her Lutheran church, which she characterizes as “just a nice community organization.” Unwittingly, she opens up a vein of fury in Will, who savagely dismisses her church as “some branch of some branch of some branch of Christianity, some vapid, meaningless organization that’s going to legislate my belief system instead of looking to God’s word for it.” His rage unappeased, he goes for the jugular: “Your life is meaningless,” he says. “My life is meaningless, and the only thing that gives any meaning, that brings any hope to this life, is my unshakeable belief that God will come again in glory to replace this disgusting life with something new, and pure, and meaningful…” Before he’s done, he’ll be consigning Anna to hell, sending her fleeing into the night.

It’s the author’s remarkable insight that, for all his sadness and vulnerability, Will burns with a fiery purity that threatens to bleach the bones of everyone with whom he comes in contact. His is a peculiarly American faith, rooted in individualism and the inerrancy of Scripture: “We didn’t want a church dedicated to any organization, we just wanted a church dedicated to Christ,” he says. Tellingly, he’s not interested in sacred mysteries; instead he seeks a kind of clarity not to be found on this side of Paradise. If the intensity of his vision destroys his chances with Anna, his attempts at sharing his beliefs with Alex lead to even more devastating consequences.

Hunter’s skill with his characters ensures that no one is patronized, andDavis McCallum’s remarkably polished production maintains a fine balance between the script’s out-of-left-field humor and its profound sadness. There’s fine work from a cast of new faces: Andrew Garmanperfectly captures Will’s deep-seated unease, his awkward body language, and halting speech. The open, almost childlike wonder with which he greets Alex’s bitter, and not inaccurate, comments is especially affecting, as is the moment when he bares the savage disappointments that fuel his faith. Matt Farabee’s self-lacerating Alex is a fine study in free-floating anger inflected with quieter glimpses of need. John Patrick Doherty persuasively evokes Leroy’s hipster, avant-garde-for-Boise attitude, as well as the worried, troubled young man underneath. Sarah Nina Hayon gives Anna a surprising edge when needed, and Danielle Slavick’s Pauline is an authoritative study of the middle manager as martinet.

All this solid work is matched by an effective production design. Jason Simms’ sterile work room setting is a finely detailed piece of photorealism. Raquel Davis’ lighting manages to suggest different times of day in a space without an exterior view; she also carves out an area downstage, representing the roadside outside the store. Whitney Loche’s costumes are thoroughly authentic looking, the apparent result of a shopping spree at Sam’s Club. M. Florian Staab’s sound design mixes melancholy guitars — the original music, in a Pat Metheny vein, is by Ryan Rumery — with the stylized sound of passing cars that punctuate each scene. In what surely must be a singular assignment for him, Rocco Disanti’s video design, which is confined to that television set, is only partially visible, and only from certain parts of the audience — but it also can be heard, and it adds to the production’s verisimilitude.

Despite the overall air of assurance, the script has occasional weaknesses. Oddly, we never get the details about Will’s abandonment of Alex — and Alex’s mother never even gets a mention. It’s also a little hard to believe that Will isn’t let go from his job the minute his interest in Alex is revealed. But, overall, A Bright New Boise is the most interesting play about religion since Keith Bunin’s The Busy World is Hushed. It’s also telling exploration of the religious and economic currents that are roiling American society right now.

–

Time Out New York/Helen Shaw/September 20, 2010

Despite the crisp wind of despair that blows all through Samuel D. Hunter’s beautifully realized A Bright New Boise, this clear-eyed comedy about faith’s meager harvest will still lift your heart. Some of it is simple delight in craft: Even the first glimpse of designer Jason Simms’s dead-on replica of a bleak Hobby Lobby break room assures us that we are in deft hands. The rest of our pleasures lie in Hunter’s gentle characterizations, a plot that mingles absurdity and genuine philosophical investigation, and a full complement of smashing comic performances.

So much of Boise relies on revelation that an explicit plot description seems spoilerish. Suffice it to say that this purgatorial box store is a collection point for a number of lost souls—a cherubic adolescent, Alex (Matt Farabee), his protector, Leroy (John Patrick Doherty, a bantam-weight Mephistopheles), sweet-natured Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) and our protagonist, Will (the brilliant Andrew Garman), whose open gaze and Midwestern shamble seem, somehow, dangerous. Corralled by their foul-mouthed manager, Pauline (Danielle Slavick), these hapless creatures try to understand both bar codes and one another; Will in particular has been caught on the horns of a faith-versus-family dilemma that will lead him to a modern-day version of the Abraham-and-Isaac decision. Will he give up the son he never knew or the religion he only tentatively maintains? In Davis McCallum’s charming production (a surprisingly funny one considering the stakes at hand), we are reminded again why the great poets only dare question God with their most divine comedies

–

Backstage/Cindy Pierre/September 15, 2010

Being part of a scandal is never easy. Seeking to connect with a child who has never known you after said scandal? That’s difficult times two. So when a former evangelical Christian’s ties to a hellfire-breathing preacher end in disgrace and the death of a teenager, we know that he’s headed down a rocky road by moving near and working close to his son, in Samuel D. Hunter’s compelling but uneven new character drama, “A Bright New Boise.”

Set predominantly inside of a Hobby Lobby crafts store, Hunter’s intentionally colorless dialogue is delivered expertly by the cast of five. Coupled with Davis McCallum’s sluggish direction, these elements paint a clear, unexpectedly warm picture of Northwestern living. The pacing is slow but never dull, because the juxtaposition of Jason Simms’ appropriately plain set with Ryan Rumery’s jagged sound bytes of original music creates a delicious irony.

“A Bright New Boise” is a nice foray into the aftermath of ruin and the beginning of redemption, but at 90 minutes we only get an introduction to these themes. Each of the characters, from Will (Andrew Garman), a quiet man seeking a new life, to his son Alex (Matt Farabee), an angst-filled performance artist, is well-drawn, but their stories beg to be developed further. The subject matter is rich and complex, but there are too many unanswered questions and scenes out of sequence. There’s also too little stage time devoted to the premise of a father uniting with his son and a hasty ending. As a result, Will is a protagonist whom we can neither root for nor abhor, even though this is the kind of passionate theme that demands we take a side.

–

Nytheatre.com/Kristin Skye Hoffman/September 15, 2010

It is rare when all the elements of a theatrical production fall perfectly into place, the script, cast, direction, technical elements and even venue all aligning to make a flawless evening of theatre. It’s a lot to ask, but that is precisely what has happened with Partial Comfort Productions’ A Bright New Boise by Samuel D. Hunter.

We begin as Will—played with subtlety and an extraordinary amount of heart by Andrew Garman—is finishing up his interview with the manager of a Hobby Lobby, Pauline (the brilliant Danielle Slavick). (Hobby Lobby is a national arts and crafts supply chain headquartered in Oklahoma City.) He has come to this particular Hobby Lobby not only to seek employment, but to begin a relationship with Alex (Matt Farabee), his anxiety-ridden, artistic son whom he gave up for adoption several years ago. Alex works there along with his adopted brother Leroy (played with superb confidence and attitude by John Patrick Doherty). Both brothers are artists who have strong convictions and a deep love for one another and the relationship that Doherty and Farabee have created is a very special one that exists both on and off the page.

Will is also looking to find refuge since his evangelical Christian Church has disbanded, its leader facing charges in the death of a young patron who was questioning his faith. He is a sweet man, quiet and reserved but with powerful convictions. He is living out of his car and keeps a smile on his face even when he feels the most miserable. He finds a kindred spirit in Anna, who is played with adorable grace and humor by Sarah Nina Hayon. She loves to read but is ridiculed for it at home and he is writing a blog about the Rapture and can’t get an internet connection at his current residence, so they find each other after hours in the break room. As we move through the play we see that each character is seeking something more than a minimum wage “joe job” for their future. Leroy is an aspiring artist, Anna escapes into books that she finishes whether she enjoys them or not, Pauline pours herself into the management of this craft store that she single-handedly restructured, and of course Alex, like many teenagers, seeks an antidote to his life of “meaninglessness” which the arrival of his estranged birth father does little to quell, that is until he finds out about his sordid evangelical past and begins to probe him for answers to the meaning of life.

Seems like a lot to take in, right? It doesn’t feel that way. Each incident that occurs over the course of this play is easily absorbed.

The ensemble is perfectly cast and I don’t think I can say enough about each individual actor’s work. Each character is beautifully fleshed out and real and the actors portraying them deliver honest, intelligent performances that draw us right into their world. Their world is the break room of a Hobby Lobby in Boise, Idaho and the parking lot outside where some life-changing events just happen to occur. Jason Simms’s dual set design is perfect, not only in its specificity and detail but in its ability to assist in delivering moments. A large window on the back wall makes for a truly perfect comic device as we get a teeny peek into several characters’ past lives before the scenes actually begin. The set paired with the lighting and sound design, by Raquel Davis and M. Florian Staab respectively, create a true slice of life.

Davis McCallum’s direction is my favorite kind: simplistic and rich. It’s admirable when the show is so honest and smooth that we don’t even realize a director has ever had a hand in it. Even his beautifully orchestrated transitions between scenes are appropriate and sometime speak volumes about the characters in them.

Partial Comfort Productions has found a real gem with this new play and another at their venue, the Wild Project. I had not previously had the pleasure of seeing a show at this small comfortable theatre, but I look forward to seeing something there again soon.

Samuel D. Hunter has offered us a humorous and touching exploration of faith and family, but not just the blood-relative variety, the kind that comes from the people who surround us in life, at work, at school, at church; the family that make this life beautiful. It also looks at fear and doubt and all the things that make it difficult to see that beauty. It analyzes the people, the good and genuine people, who are so miserable in their lives that they focus completely on what is coming after it. The people who believe that the life they have been given is so full of garbage and sadness that there is no way that this could be the “gift from God” they feel they were promised so it must be the heaven that lies after it. It is haunting and painful and empathetic. It is all summed up when Will says, “There are greater things in life. There have to be.”

I encourage you to see this production now while the tickets are affordable. This production deserves an off-Broadway run and if they get it, I know that I will most certainly be in the audience.

–

CurtainUp/Amanda Cooper/based on 9/11/10 performances

In New York City, we find ways to separate ourselves from the middle of the country constantly. Perhaps it’s about the multitude of big-box stores, or maybe the prevalence of Pentecostal churches. Or lack of higher education, or exposure to art. . . point being, A Bright New Boise(as in Boise, Idaho) forces us to meet some real people, who all work in a big chain store in Boise. Some of them are religious, some graduated from high school, some have an interest in art. All of them, like every one of us city folk, are searching for meaning and purpose in their lives

The play opens with a job interview with Will (Andrew Garman), who quickly becomes The Hobby Lobby’s newest employee. He has recently moved from a small town, for reasons unknown. As the manager Pauline exits the breakroom for paperwork, a teenage cashier enters and Will seems fascinated. We quickly find out the young Alex (Matt Farabee) is his biological son. This crucial tidbit is literally how Will introduces himself to a stunned, silent Alex.

As it turns out, Will was a part of a small, cultish church that recently disbanded over a controversy. His search for new direction in life led him to his biological son, with hopes of finally having a relationship with him, and perhaps even a new life. Certainly, Will’s intention is at least for a new start.

We meet a couple other Hobby Lobby employees. There’s the sweet Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) who seems to have a lot in common with Will and quickly becomes fond of him. Then there’s Leroy, Alex’s foster brother who is aggressively protective of Alex, and an angry conceptual artist to boot.

Playwright Samuel D Hunter could have easily taken a preachy point of view to these people’s less than ideal lives, but he doesn’t. He also could have written a play filled with the quick, unfair judgments we make of Evangelical middle America, but he doesn’t really do that, either. Instead, this is a play about escape: how we all need a way to escape reality. Will has his faith in God (and had his church), Leroy has his art, Pauline puts all her energy into The Hobby Lobby, and Anna has books. Alex may currently have music, but he is struggling to find his true form of escape. Unfortunately, as we see in this play, some forms of escape have the ability to hurt those around you.

The creative team for A Bright New Boise has put together a solid, deeply moving production with just the right amount of polish. Director David McCallum has approached the play without any bells and whistles, really giving the story the opportunity to shine and affect. Jason Simms’ set feel exactly like what it’s supposed to be — a breakroom in anywhere, USA. I don’t mean to be giving the actors short shrift here. They all get their characters and don’t play them as ignorant or average. Even though the theater season has just started, this show will likely be one of my favorites.

A special mention must also go to this space, The Wild Project, which was recently renovated as a Green theater. That means energy saving light bulbs and toilets, and eco-friendly (and comfortable!) seating.

–

The L Magazine/Benjamin Sutton/September 16, 2010

Samuel D. Hunter’s plays track broken families limping forward, trying to walk off their misery. InJack’s Precious Moments the brother, widow and father of a man beheaded in Iraq go looking for answers; in Five Genocides a widow tries to carry out the mad obsession that consumed her husband, despite his parents’ apprehensions; and in A Bright New Boise, having its premiere with Partial Comfort (through October 2), Will (Andrew Garman), a tall, sweetly shy middle-aged man hopes to reconnect with his prickly, panic attack-prone teenage son Alex (Matt Farabee), whom he gave up for adoption. Will’s reputation, or rather that of his former church, a radical Christian congregation upstate that disbanded in scandal after a young member’s death, precedes him, and Alex’s righteous brother Leroy (John Patrick Doherty) sets out to rupture the rapprochement. Hard not to grow close at the Hobby Lobby, though, a big box crafts supply store where all three work after Will’s arrival in Boise in the opening scene. The setting’s break room comedy (on Jason Simms’ perfect realist set) and flickers of romance alternate with Will and Alex’s tentative, sometimes reluctant and closely monitored attempts to build a relationship.

Reversing the crisis in Hunter’s two recent plays, faith is a certainty in Boise, and family constantly needs reaffirmation. Will never stops believing in god, though he rarely seems certain of his capacities as a father. Leroy’s parents, who adopted Alex, are described early on as a pair of feuding drunks and never mentioned again. The Hobby Lobby offers bits of both spiritual and parental guidance. Something between a dysfunctional family and a splintering cult, its maniacal manager Pauline (Danielle Slavick) developed a god complex while rebuilding the faltering franchise into a profitable store. Her shouting matches with Leroy have airs of habituated marital battles. He, an aspiring artist, tries to convert customers with shock therapy by donning a series of hilarious typographic t-shirts. “Soccer moms and grade school kids and little old ladies,” he tells Will proudly, “they all have to confront the reality of the words before they get their arts and crafts supplies. You want a foam ball? Fuck. You want some acrylic paints? Cunt. You want some pipe cleaners? You Will Eat Your Children.” The only other employee we see—although Mandy, in a running gag, is constantly called and cursed, but never shows—Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) has tried every chain store in town, but likes hanging with Will after hours in the break room. A TV in the corner streams corporate dogma 24\7, except when crossed satellite signals turn to a gruesome medical channel.

Hunter fills out these mundane lives and locales with superb details and compassion, and director Davis McCallum (who also helmed Five Genocides) makes transitions from family drama into workplace comedy quick and smooth. Save the very effective whooshing sounds that beam us into every scene, like a TV zapping to life before the screen lights up, Boise adheres more closely to strict realism than Precious Moments and Five Genocides. The excellent cast stretches the emotional verisimilitude a little when the play’s at its funniest—which is quite often—while Will and Anna’s tentative chemistry resonates especially well in the calmer passages. The most difficult scenes, between estranged father and son, suffer from an emotional distance between the actors larger than that between their characters. Garman and Farabee lose some of the play’s dynamic intensity in those exchanges, though that’s nothing a fade-to-black and brisk zap into the next scene won’t solve. Uncertainties about the importance of family don’t seem to run as deep as the skepticism reserved for organized religion. The final flourish of surrealism closes Boise more ambiguously than recurring intimations of doom and disaster would lead us to expect. If it lacks the relatively tidy emotional takeaways of Hunter’s previous plays, it’s also more rooted in a place and culture. Boiseans: they’re just like us!

–

Reviews Off Broadway/unknown/September 17, 2010

It is the story of Will (Andrew Garman), who arrives in Boise from “up north” to take a job at the local big box hobby story, the Hobby Lobby. It is quickly revealed that he is the birth father of Alex (Matt Farabee), a high school employee at the same store. Will has taken this particular job to reconnect with the son he put up for adoption. But Will comes with some serious baggage aside from giving up his son. He was a member of an Evangelical Church that was recently involved in the accidental death of young man. The church is now infamous and Willis running from that association.

In addition to reconnecting with his son, he is trying to maintain a connection to his belief system – a system he which he has invested much of his self worth. Meanwhile, Alex has questions of his own to broach with his father. Will must balance of emotional availability versus not intruding on his son.
Will’s balancing act is even more challenging once the demands of the other Hobby Lobby employees are added to the mix. Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) is a shy coworker who thinks Will might be a kindred spirit. Leroy (John Patrick Doherty) is Boise Bohemian who is quick to anger, but has Alex’s best interest at heart. And Pauline (Danielle Slavick) is the efficient, if high strung, store manager who just wants people to do their jobs.

Andrew Garman and Matt Farabee are great in their roles in very different ways. As Will, Mr. Garman is hesitant and socially awkward. Matt Farabee is suitably full of adolescent angst and annoyance. They have similar problems relating to the world around them, but unique responses to the problems of the world. Sarah Nina Hayon and John Patrick Doherty both seemed very at comfortable in their roles as well, inhabiting them with no reservations.

Danielle Slavick brings an honest craziness to the role of Pauline. She is a manager that wants to be a friend, but more than anything else wants her store to operate smoothly. Her random rants, outburst and inappropriate comments bring the most laughter.

The set the break room in the Hobby Lobby by Jason Simms, captures the concrete blandness of corporate big box employers. Davis McCallum directs this play with a perfect touch, allowing the actors to take their time to build relationships between each other and the audience.
A Bright New Boise is a great show.

–

Talk Entertainment/Oscar E. Moore/September 29, 2010

As I left The Wild Project on East 3rd Street between Avenues A & B where I had just seen “A Bright New Boise” by Samuel D. Hunter as it ends its added performances run on Oct 2nd I couldn’t help but wonder what all the critical praise was about.

Yes, the acting from all the members of the five person cast is excellent. More than excellent, in fact. They bring out all the despair and dark humor inherent in the characters written by Mr. Hunter. The direction by Davis McCallum is solid. The set (Jason Simms) is appropriately functional in a Boise corporate way with a glass window that lets us see characters racing by or reacting through the glass which is a nice inventive touch.

Andrew Garman as Will – a shy disgraced member of a nondenominational “cult” Church where the pastor is under arrest for allowing a young man to die, comes to Boise to get a minimum wage paying job at “Hobby Lobby” a craft store in order to reconnect with his son Alex (Matt Farabee) who he had put up for adoption.

Alex, prone to having panic attacks, is now living with foster parents and has unrealized dreams of becoming a songwriter/ performer and is working at the store. His co-worker and half brother Leroy (John Patrick Doherty) has visions of being an artist and is extremely protective in a menacing way, wary that the seemingly fanatical Will, will try to convert Alex.

Pauline (Danielle Slavick) the fast talking, potty mouthed manager of Hobby Lobby is trying to keep all in order as the situation begins to unravel. Sarah Nina Hayon (Anna) another lost sole worker who loves to read and spend time after hours in the break room after secretly hiding out till the store closes tries to befriend Will and offers to listen to him read her his blog/novel about “The Rapture”.

Basically that is it. Except for the script itself which I found problematic and overflowing with religious belief jargon that takes the play into another realm all together while losing touch with the basic reason Will came back to Boise – to reconnect with his son.

There are two abrupt endings. One for each act that leaves one wondering what happened.

–

‘kul: That Sounds Cool/Aaron Riccio/October 1, 2010

In Samuel D. Hunter’s previous play, Jack’s Precious Moment, a genuine religious struggle was lost amid an exaggerated reality and an overly comic tone. His latest, A Bright New Boise, is all the more arresting, given its grounding in the mundane and ho-hum. Fifty-something Will (the tremendous Andrew Garman) is praying (“Now. Now. Now.”) before an interview with the high-strung Pauline (Danielle Slavick): why is he so eager to get a minimum-wage, part-time employment at the Hobby Lobby (a big-box craft supply store)? It soon comes out that he’s actually the father of fellow employee Alex (Matt Farabee), with whom he hopes to reconnect so that he has something to live for, since his prayers for the Rapture to come burn his ugly world away have gone unanswered: “Without God, all I am is a terrible father who lives in his car and works at Hobby Lobby–there has to be something more.”

Davis McCallum’s naturalistic approach works exceedingly well here, especially on Jason Simms’s picture-perfect break-room set. Hobby Lobby promotional videos blare at all hours on the television–except for when the satellite feeds cross and accidentally show graphic surgical footage instead–and the microwave makes loud clunking noises as it heats up Will’s pathetic Chef Boyardee lunch. The Wal-Mart-greeter-like outfits and abstractly chippy corridor only re-enforce the “cheer” these workers have, as does Pauline’s aggressively work-focused attitude, a sort of anti-faith-faith that is meant to keep her too busy to think about the quality of her life. Surely there must be more.

It’s a cold, calculating look at the reasons for faith, but in a warm, seriocomic way that takes its characters seriously enough to laugh with them, not at them. (It’s in many ways the sort of play you’d expect Neil LaBute. albeit a nicer version, to have written.) Nor is it dismissive of anyone’s views: Leroy (John Patrick Doherty), Alex’s foster brother and the sort of brash artist who sets out to “deliberately make you uncomfortable,” is allowed to see Will’s faith as nonsense, but that doesn’t make it so. Coworker Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) has a rough past of her own, but she uses her Lutheran faith as a tool, not a crutch. And though Alex is surrounded by all these views, he’s developed one of his own, creating horrible rape-and-kidnapping stories about his past in order to gin up sympathy for what he sees as a bleak and hopeless future.

They joke, they smile, and they hurt, and they do it so sincerely that A Bright New Boise will break your heart. Over the course of these two hours, Will is given chance after chance to step away from his negative choices and to live in the present, rather than to desperately await the future. His cult-like church has been dissolved (pending the criminal investigation of its pastor), there’s a hint of romance between him and Anna, there’s an on-again-off-again relationship with his temperamental son, and even Leroy–grudgingly–is willing to give him a chance to make things right, and yet he is too invested in his memories, in his choices, to truly make a fresh start. The tragedy of Will’s life is that there is more, but to embrace it, he must accept that his faith must be less.

For we in the audience, however, there is no such crisis of faith: we can accept, conscience clear and free, that A Bright New Boise is nothing less than a good, challenging play.

–

New York Magazine/Scott Brown/September 28, 2010

A Bright New Boise, the simple, superb little heartland heartbreaker from playwright Samuel D. Hunter and director Davis McCallum, features characters you’ll recognize from many a theatrical foray into that Christ-haunted Other America: lost souls working the ennui aisle at some desolate big box, a tortured Christian fundamentalist, a Guffmanesque small-town artiste … the usual suspects in a rube tragedy, in other words. Well, this is a rube tragedy — a respectful and honest-feeling one, for a change — and by jingo, it sings.

The script is straightforward, like everything else about this production (from Jason Simms’s eye-poppingly hyperliteral set on down), with a story and structure that’s punch-clock ordinariness itself, but teased with the possibility of the sublime and the Gothic. (A recurring device involving a TV set that malfunctions at highly meaningful moments falls just short of Hell-House egregiousness — but so help me, I was still scared of the damned thing.) Will (Andrew Garman) takes a job at the Hobby Lobby, a chain craft store in an Idaho strip mall, with the sole aim of reconnecting with Alex (Matt Farabee), the son he put up for adoption fourteen years before. It’s a bold and indisputably creepy move, stalking the son you’ve never met at his workplace — and it gets creepier when Will’s revealed to be a charter member of an evangelical congregation recently disbanded under a cloud of scandal. Yet in testament to Hunter’s artistry and McCallum’s smarts, we’re still rooting for the guy, often half against our better judgment: Will spends his evenings quietly tapping away at his online leviathan, a mammoth work of Internet end-time fan fiction. Over and over, night after night, he revises Armageddon, and, to the credit of the playmakers, we’re right there with him. Like us, like anyone with any sensitivities at all, spiritual or otherwise, he simply wants his ghastly, fluoro-lit Wal-world to fall away and reveal a better one. Can we fault him for living in hope? Even if his hope ultimately takes the shape of a horrifying absolute, slouching towards Sam’s Club? As keenly, sensitively played by Garman, Will manages to be both the scariest and the sanest guy in the room.

Here, “the room” is a break room, and Boise is, in many ways, a breakroom-sink melodrama, saved from bathos by Hunter’s unquenchable humor and scrupulous emotional honesty, and McCallum’s spot-on casting and tonal discipline. The Hobby Lobby is peopled with misfits like Will, busted-compass truthseekers with shaky orthodoxies to defend, who are just shy of becoming Types. There’s Alex’s protective foster-brother Leroy (exciting newcomer John Patrick Doherty), an art-school poseur with a rotation of sad agitprop T-shirts (“You Will Eat Your Children”) and delusions of Banksyish grandeur. There’s the manager Pauline (Danielle Slavick), a tinpot technocrat who sees herself locked in a struggle against “chaos.” And then there’s the lost soul, Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon), who’s the most obvious candidate for some kind of conversion — and, miserably, knows it. It’s easy to see how geometrically these tiles could align, and align they do. But rest assured, no easy catharsis answers the altar call, no clouds part, no seas boil — though Hunter keeps you on the edge of your seat, just as Will’s God keeps him on the edge of his.

Stage and Cinema/Michael Narkunski/September 20, 2010

Coming into The Wild Project you will be kindly informed that there are drinks for sale and that you are allowed to bring them into the show. You might prefer to not have any distractions for such crisp, idiosyncratic performances, and you might not be thirsty enough to want to gulp over such attuned, effortless dialogue, but my suggestion is you go for it—A Bright New Boise, set almost fully in the break room of an Idaho Hobby Lobby, plays on the themes of ambition, surrender and the suburban struggle with meaning in all the ways that demand a bottle of beer. That is, of course—according to protagonist Will (Andrew Garman)—unless you have religion.

Not that he means to push it on anybody. At least, that’s what our questionably stalwart hero claims when he comes to work at the same chain-store as his long lost teenage son, Alex (Matt Farrabee), with whom he wishes to reconnect. He even keeps the fact that he was a church bookkeeper off his resume for head manager Pauline (exquisite alarmist Danielle Slavick), although the fact that his pastor turned out to be a lunatic murderer may have been a factor. But yet despite his quiet, likable manner, and the sincerely moved reactions he has to Alex’s music, angst, and hilariously bad performance art, Will’s past and beliefs continually poke out and haunt him, mucking up his plans for a new life.

A Bright New Boise is special in that it is not so much a crisis-of-faith play as it is a study in Will’s non-crisis-of-faith and the impossible situation fervor sets up for him and his fellow, soft-skulled employees, who can’t seem to turn off those gross surgeries that keep popping up on the break room TV (“Um leave it on… no no turn it off… wait!”). You’d usually need to see a documentary film or good reality television to see social dynamics like this at work, but playwright Samuel D. Hunter has so sharply observed his home state (holey socks, Chef Boyardee) and the psychology of the religious that New York theater now gets its turn to tell the chilling truth about the quiet tyranny of people’s “truths.” Which is a great thing—that is, of course, unless you have religion.