It is one of the most memorable sights on Broadway so far this season: Laurie Metcalf, armed with a vacuum cleaner in Samuel D. Hunter’s play Little Bear Ridge Road.
“Armed” is truly the best description for how Metcalf wields the contraption. Her character Sarah—vexatious, hair unkempt, happiest in a fleece, scowl etched across her features—is not simply cleaning the carpet around the couch she and nephew Ethan (Micah Stock) habitually occupy in her home on the outskirts of Troy, Idaho.
The vacuuming is also intended as a vigorous emotional and practical prod directed at Ethan, and a blunt instrument of her own inner anger. You might breathe a sigh of relief when Metcalf takes the machine off-stage.
Hunter, whose plays include The Whale (later made into a movie), likes to set his dramas in his native Idaho, featuring characters living on all kinds of edges. He is making his Broadway debut with this play (Booth Theatre, through Feb. 15, 2026), describing the sole piece of furniture on stage as “a couch in a void,” and the trajectory of time as “various points from 2020 to 2022,” a swathe of the pandemic era. That explains the surgical mask Ethan is wearing when he first arrives at Sarah’s house—and also the context of a play about two intensely private, distressed people, beset by inertia and ghosts of the past, living in close cohabitation.
Little Bear Ridge Road, sensitively and crisply directed by Joe Mantello, marks the return to theater-producing by the scandal-hit Scott Rudin. (Full disclosure: His partner in producing Little Bear Ridge Road—which premiered with Steppenwolf Theatre Company in the summer of 2024—is Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC, the majority owner of the Daily Beast.)
“I have a lot more self-control than I had four years ago,” Rudin told the New York Times in March in relation to the multiple allegations of bullying and bad behavior previously made against him. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy…I don’t want to let anybody down. Not just myself. My husband, my family and collaborators.” (Rudin, an 18-time Tony Award-winner, will produce at least three more Broadway shows, and one off-Broadway show, this season and next.)
The vacuum cleaner moment is not an isolated one in commanding one’s absolute attention. Little Bear Ridge Road, which runs about 95 minutes (with no intermission), serves as a showcase and masterclass of Metcalf’s acting abilities and command of the stage. Over and over again, your mind delightedly switches between “She just said that!” and “She just did that!”
Sarah and Ethan have been brought together in the wake of her brother, who is his father’s, death—and all the practicalities of house-clearing and estate settlement attendant on that. With the loss comes memories and Ethan’s bitter anger that Sarah did the bare minimum—as it turns out, driving past Ethan’s family house, looking towards its windows—when it came to protecting him from what was a nightmarish childhood that has left many scars.
In a sense, aunt and nephew’s moods of curdled exhaustion match each other, meaning they are both primed to explode but also primed to understand the other’s explosions. In this witty and moving play, they’re a kind of careworn Bert and Ernie, yoked together, weary yet companionably attuned to seeing the world in all its frazzled awfulness.
As Sarah and Ethan sit on the couch—with its circular stretch of carpet, an all-black stage around them and a background of scarred walls (the minimal design is by Scott Pask)—they watch on an unseen television set stretches and snippets of programs that unite them: ridiculously complicated crime dramas, reality TV, shows that both demand attention and help defrost years of estrangement.
Little Bear Ridge Road is a play where a lot happens, but quietly, like a series of invisible tectonic shifts. Sarah is hiding something huge from Ethan, which changes their entire relationship, adding another level of care and empathy.
Ethan also acquires a boyfriend, James (an excellent John Drea), who is studying astrophysics.
They meet in a queer bar, and a relationship develops. In a brutal sense, this first seems implausible: James is lovely, rich, hot, kind, and maybe could do better (if not in this small town). Ethan is awkward, rude, unambitious, and not exactly inviting of intimacy. Yet, by dint of the performances and generosity of human oddness and fallibility the play’s text allows, you recognize their potential. A similar internal logic fuels one’s hope that Sarah and Ethan will find their own way through their familial quagmire.
On this small stage the real delight are the performances, and Hunter’s expertly crafted lines that Metcalf and Stock devour. “If you can’t find someone else for me to get mad at, then I’m going to have to get mad at you,” Ethan rails at one phone-line employee.
“Oh…you can kiss him! I told you, I find it interesting,” Sarah shouts at Ethan as he hesitates to kiss James in front of her.
“I hate this country,” Ethan declares at one point.
“Oh, trust me. It hates you more,” Sarah shoots back.
The play both bears this thought out, yet also contends people—even unintentionally, and despite their fractured, burdened selves—can find a better way to be with each other and support each other.
This isn’t conveyed sentimentally, but gently. And it is there right in front of us, in scenes—sprouting from James’ professional pursuit—that major on the composition and meanings of space and the universe. Observe the set itself: the black background, clunkily big couch, and the crucible of carpet containing the play’s frustrating, frustrated, yet winning characters. This imagined room, this stage, is its own modest planet, everyday and also otherworldly, spinning away from us but also right there: fixed, meaningful, and shining bright.
