Playwright Samuel D. Hunter is a tenderhearted herder of
souls who are lost out there somewhere in the great vast empty spaces that
still mark parts of the United States. This is most evident in his latest work,
The Few, about a trio of lonely folks who teeter between anxious hopelessness
and a vague and undefined sense of faith—inhabitants, as one of them puts it,
of a “church without God.”
In a solidly acted production at the Rattlestick
Playwrights Theater, The Few takes place in a trailer that serves as home to a
pennysaver newspaper catering to long-distance truckers. Its income is derived
from classified personal ads that truckers call in and record on an answering
machine; we get to hear a number of these during the course of the evening, and
they too contribute to the mixed atmosphere of isolation and wistful longing
that runs through the play.
The enterprise is barely enough to pay the bills for its
editor QZ (Tasha Lawrence) and her young assistant Matthew (Gideon Glick), for
whom the trailer and the work provide a sanctuary from a world that has not
been kind to him. The pair are managing
to keep things afloat as best they can when in walks Bryan (Michael Laurence),
the newspaper’s founder and still its owner, who skipped town four years
earlier. Now he is back, though the
reason for his return remains nebulous, possibly even to him.
The characters give up their secrets slowly, and even when
they do there are no surprise revelations, only moments where quiet truths come
to the fore. What there is of tension
derives from the question of the newspaper’s future. It began as a means of trying to create a sense
of community among the readership, but it has gradually lost that intent in the
name of making ends meet.
Matthew (terrifically portrayed by Mr. Glick as a twitchy
bundle of social awkwardness) wants nothing more than to see the paper return
to its founding principles. He keeps a
copy of Bryan’s initial statement-of-purpose in his wallet and periodically
pulls it out and reads aloud from it.
But Bryan has long since lost any such sense of purpose, and QZ—with
whom Bryan was in a longstanding relationship when he skipped out—is pretty
much ready to call it quits herself.
Hunter’s world of quirky characters may remind you of
something conjured up by Sam Shepard, but where Shepard’s cache of weaponry
includes serious ammo, Hunter literally offers up BBs, capable of laying down new
wounds on top of old scars without destroying.
QZ, Bryan, and Matthew are richly drawn and richly acted by the cast,
under the sure hand of director Davis McCallum. As they and the voices of the truckers on the answering machine seek to
make connections, we can only wish them well.
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