Theatre in Review: The Few (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)

	Michael Laurence, Tasha Lawrence. Photo: Joan Marcus

One of the playwright Samuel D. Hunter's many virtues is his freshness of vision; he shows us characters and worlds we haven't seen before. In The Few, the lights come up on a dingy, cluttered trailer interior in which a man and a woman are staring at each other. He is Bryan and she is QZ, and they haven't seen each other in four years; the atmosphere is thick with guilt and hostility. As it happens, Bryan has plenty of reason for remorse and QZ's rage is well-founded.

Years earlier, Bryan, QZ, and Jim founded a monthly newspaper for truckers called The Few. Having logged thousands of miles on cross-country routes themselves, Bryan and Jim were all too aware of the displacement that truck drivers can feel as they spend hundreds of hours confined to tiny cabs, rolling along mile after mile of empty highway. As he notes, in a passage that reveals Hunter's fine, understated way with dialogue, "It does something to you, driving that much. Jim and I were both doing runs across the whole country, easily saw 48 states between the two of us. After a while--you start to feel like you don't exist. Like you're never in a place long enough to even exist. You stop talking to people at gas stations and truck stops, you start avoiding the restaurants where the waitresses might recognize you, you start sleeping in the back of your cab just so you don't have to talk to a motel clerk. You go to diners and truck stops full of other long-haul guys, and you don't even look at each other."

Thus The Few, the newspaper, was a labor of love, until Jim died in an apparent car accident, taking with him another car containing an entire family. Bryan disappeared, leaving QZ with the job of keeping The Few going and paying off its growing debts. She has done so by doing away with the soulful writing provided by Bryan and Jim in favor of 12 pages of personal ads. A typical example: "Looking for lady co-pilot to navigate end times. Spacious bunker with comfortable bed, running water, tape deck. Can withstand four-megaton blast. Me: over 60. You: under 40. Let's ride!" QZ also offers a brief editorial and a horoscope page. "I make them up," she announces defiantly.

Now Bryan, having lost his taste for life on the run, and clearly out of all resources, has come back, hoping to stay with QZ in the northern Idaho trailer park where she lives. She wants no part of this plan, but finally gives in, at least for the moment. Bryan clearly hopes he and QZ can take up where they left off, romantically speaking, but she puts the kibosh on that right away, informing him she has met a man through correspondence. And, she notes, "He's actually better than you in every way imaginable." In any case, Bryan hasn't counted on the presence of Matthew, QZ's editorial assistant. A young 19, he was thrown out of his family's home when his stepfather caught him fooling around with another boy. The love-starved young man is desperately in need of a father figure, and he gloms onto Bryan, who is manifestly not the man for the job.

It is remarkable how quickly and economically Hunter establishes this highly singular situation, populated by odd, marginal characters, and makes us care what happens to them. This isn't a matter of identifying with them: Bryan is clearly a mess, QZ is eaten up with rage, and Matthew is the kind of needy kid who gets on your nerves as much as he touches your heart. But, thrown together, they make a chemical reaction that results in real drama, especially when Matthew tries to revive Bryan and QZ's old tradition of hosting parties-cum-rap sessions for their readers. The party is a nonstarter, but there's plenty of liquor on hand, leading to a series of confrontations--including a farcical duel, complete with BB gun, between Matthew and Bryan--that percolate with the characters' fury and sorrow. As Hunter disburses a series of revelations that include Matthew's connection to Jim, the hard facts about Jim's death, the truth about Bryan's disappeared years, among other things, the fate of all three characters comes to seem of enormous importance.

Such a fresh, unusual dramatic sensibility needs sensitive handling from the director, and it is Hunter's good fortune to have found Davis McCallum (who also directed A Bright New Boise and The Whale). McCallum's handling of the script is alert to all of its nuances, many of which signal the tectonic shifts to come in the lives of the characters. (He even does well by the script's least credible twist, involving the identity of QZ's mail order swain.) He has also cast the production exceptionally well. Michael Laurence is especially skilled at playing dissipated characters, and he fully captures Bryan's despair and his halting, tentative attempts at reaching out to QZ. The look of need, mixed with guilt, in his eyes, is especially right for the character. Tasha Lawrence can be as tough as they come--and she doles out her savage assessments with all due authority--but she never loses sight of QZ's wounded idealism. Gideon Glick's Matthew is a mass of nervous gestures and stifled hopes; a gifted writer, he is desperately looking for some kind of outside confirmation that he matters. At the same time, he has an inner core of steel; you can hear it when he confronts an astoundingly hungover Bryan, who, in his cups, has made suicidal noises. "Could you not drink that antifreeze, please," says Matthew, as if speaking to a truant child.

The rest of the production is equally fine. Dane Laffrey's set design is remarkably depressing, and I mean that as the highest praise; from its drab beige palette to its water-stained ceiling, cheap furniture, and abundance of clutter, it is clearly a space where love is absent. (The out-of-date computer gear signals the play's time frame, set just before the whole Y2K hullabaloo proved to be nothing at all.) Eric Southern's lighting provides a number of fine time-of-day looks, especially when he blasts afternoon sunlight through the stage left windows. Jessica Pabst's costumes fit perfectly with each character. Daniel Kluger's sound design and original music are both fine.

In this play and in works like A Bright New Boise and The Whale, Hunter has perfected the art of drawing marginal characters consumed by loneliness, without even a trace of sentimentality. He is also the rare playwright who casts a searching light on his characters' spiritual needs, most often expressed in their need for a community to sustain them. (As Bryan recalls, QZ called their outreach efforts as "a church without God." Ironically, the consequences of Matthew's disastrous party send all three characters spinning off in new and unexpected directions, leaving tantalizingly open what will happen to them next. It is to Hunter's credit that we leave the theatre wondering, with real concern, what their fates will be.--David Barbour