Theatre in Review: Grangeville (Signature Theatre Company) Samuel D. Hunter has mastered the art of theatrical double vision. Beginning in close-up, Grangeville is often as intimate as a whisper yet, zooming out, it reveals an America in terrible disarray. The playwright's method is deceptively simple: Two actors take on four roles in a small-scale story that resonates far beyond the trials of a few unhappy people to offer a quiet, yet devastating, comment on a way of life grown economically and spiritually threadbare. At its heart, Grangeville is the story of estranged half-brothers, the only remaining shards of a long-shattered family. Their mother, who lives in the Idaho town of the title, is, after a lifetime of hellraising, gravely ill and mired in debt. Lost in piles of Medicaid paperwork and past-due notices, Jerry, the older son, reaches out to Arnold, an artist expatriated to the Netherlands. Arnold, whose badly frayed connection to Grangeville was effectively terminated when he married his husband, Bram, seventeen years earlier - nobody from home attended his wedding -- wants no part of his mother's mess. The brothers' initial phone conversation -- held first in darkness, eventually illuminated by a deliberately long, slow lights-up cue -- is so fraught with unnamed tensions that you might initially think they are ex-lovers. Indeed, after so many years, they are virtual strangers. Jerry, who stayed in Grangeville, is busy sorting through the collateral damage of his wrecked marriage, which includes money troubles, an ever-more-distant son, and a suicide attempt. Struggling to get by, he is back in his mother's trailer, surrounded by souvenirs of the past, including the statue, bought at a flea market, that she devoutly believes is a Giacometti. With nowhere else to turn, he reaches out to Arnie, who vividly remembers a childhood filled with abuse. "I was just trying to toughen him up," Jerry says, his voice riddled with shame. Stacey, his skeptical ex, asks, "By 'toughen him up,' do you mean beat the shit out of him?" At first glance, you might think Arnie has escaped a youth scarred by an absent father, a criminally neglectful mother, and an abusive half-sibling. But his marriage is in trouble and his career is badly adrift. Having made a splash with dioramas of Grangeville -- the town he insists he has forgotten -- he worries he has nothing left to say. Exercising his skill for self-laceration, he says, "Making fun of America, it's the one theme in modern European art that is consistently evergreen...you make little models of Dairy Queens and strip malls and rural highways, suddenly you're critiquing late-stage American imperialism. I thought I was just showing people things from where I grew up." Unable to move forward, semi-separated from Bram, he is frightened at the idea of being an art-world also-ran, dismissing himself as a "scrappy damaged American crawling himself up the ladder from a communications major at a state school, excavating the tacky landscapes of his childhood." Like it or not, if any soul repair work is to happen, Arnie and Jerry only have each other and Grangeville tracks their halting, painful coming together, searching for common ground and whatever peace may be available. Hunter's plays benefit from solid construction and terse dialogue that carries the weight of a hundred wounds, but what really distinguishes him is his empathy and breadth of vision. At a time when so many playwrights focus entirely on identity politics, Hunter sees the bigger picture. His characters inhabit a landscape hollowed out by the full menu of heartland ills, including economic upheaval, addiction, and social isolation. Grangeville is like so many other towns: Gone with the good jobs are the social, civic, and church organizations that fostered feelings of community. It's everyone for themselves now, and good luck with that. Jack Serio's production has occasional problems; for one thing, Grangeville would benefit from a less oppressive set than the stark stucco wall, relieved only by a door, provided by the scenic collective dots. (This may not be entirely their fault; based on the work I've seen so far, Serio doesn't have much of a visual sense, and the design improves markedly in the final scene when the action moves to the interior of a trailer.) But Serio's handling of the actors doesn't miss a nuance. Paul Sparks' Jerry is a profoundly lost soul, trying to do the right thing yet losing his grip on everything he values. ("Lately it just feels like the ground below me is turning into water," he says. "And I'm about to sink.") Trying to reframe the past in benign terms, stung by Arnie's unforgiving memory, he notes, "It's like he's taken the worst parts of me, and he's just decided that it's all that I am." (Note also how Sparks pronounces "diorama," as if it were some obscure Latin term, and the quizzical way he looks at one of Arnold's paintings, accidentally telling the truth about it: "It's really unsettled.") He is also fine when impersonating Bram, who sadly understands that he cannot help Arnold out of despair. Brian J. Smith's Arnold is a control freak running herd on a gale of unruly emotions, insisting that he has moved on yet, decades later, still locked in a defensive crouch against long-past torments. Indeed, he has let go of nothing; as the frustrated Bram notes, "It's like shooting clay pigeons with you, I can't keep track of your grievances!" Smith can endow the most casual line with a pregnant pause that hints at a multitude of quiet disappointments; shedding his passive-aggressive manner, he rises to considerable fury when the occasion calls for it. He is equally acute as Stacey, who, nicely, but firmly, informs Jerry that for them there is no going back. If the set design is unnecessarily bleak, Stacey Derosier skillfully carves the actors out of the darkness with her geometric lighting schemes. Ricky Reynoso's costumes communicate volumes about the different lives led by Jerry and Arnie. Christopher Darbassie's solid sound design uses reinforcement for phone conversations and supplies as passing traffic. What's especially impressive is Hunter's ability to trace lives shaped by failure without diminishing them; whatever bad choices they have made, their ability to love endures. Bringing them together in their mother's trailer, cluttered with detritus, including that so-called Giacometti, a false symbol of wealth and artistic achievement, they engage in a game of Uno -- a ritual from their past -- that might be the beginning of a truce. Or maybe even some kind of renewal. In any case, Jerry and Arnold are learning to play the cards they've been dealt. --David Barbour 
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