WHERE LONELINESS ECHOES
AND CONSTELLATIONS ARE CALLING

She gets up at dawn and is asleep by eight. She lives alone and doesn’t like people. Nobody at the hospital (where she’s worked for forty years) likes her. She watches TV and complains non-stop. In short, she’s thoroughly disagreeable.

But what can you do if she’s your only living relative, your dad just died, and you need her help? That’s the predicament faced by Ethan Fernsby, an unemployed, homeless writer who seeks refuge at his Aunt Sarah’s house in a remote corner of Idaho, to ask her help in settling the estate of his recently deceased father (her brother).

Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock

So here’s the surprise: as played by Micah Stock and the amazing Laurie Metcalf, this odd nephew/aunt pair turn out to be one of the most moving family units on Broadway in years, in this stirring play called Little Bear Ridge Road by Samuel D. Hunter, now playing at the Booth Theatre.

Set in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, this is a small play (with only three characters and a momentary fourth) that tackles the huge themes of isolation and loneliness, also found in Hunter’s other plays (e.g., A Case for the Existence of God) featuring characters in crisis. To put it simply, Ethan has nowhere to go and no one to be with. His mother abandoned him at an early age, and his father became a drug addict, whom he hadn’t seen in years. Indeed, the last time his father reached out to him was to borrow money from his son. Though he holds a master’s degree in creative writing, Ethan has been unable to produce anything. He’s been living in Seattle, working in a bookstore (the closest to literature he can get at the time), until he fled the abusive male lover with whom he’d been cohabiting.

Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock

Once Sarah helps with the sale of his father’s house (for which he netted only $8,000), Ethan finds himself staying on with her, sharing their one and only activity—watching television shows about aliens. Obsessed with his family’s past, he’s unable to restart his life. “The last Fernsbys,” he calls his Aunt Sarah and himself, the end of a long line he’s traced back to the seventeenth century. “All the way back to the covered wagon times,” he tells his aunt as they sort through his father’s meager remaining possessions. “And this is where it ends. With you and me, right here. And a f—ing dead cat.”

When the childless Aunt Sarah reveals to him that she’s had four miscarriages and that her husband left her long ago, Ethan seems too self-absorbed to care.

Micah Stock, Laurie Metcalf, and John Drea

A year passes, and it’s 2021. Enter James (John Drea); he and Ethan meet at a bar and thereafter become lovers. A graduate student in astrophysics, James is a kind, caring, compassionate person. He’s concerned about his own sister, who is in an abusive marriage. He’s concerned about Aunt Sarah, who (he accidentally learns) has been undergoing treatment for cancer. Above all, James is concerned about Ethan, whom he loves. He invites Ethan to move with him to Chicago where James hopes to attend a Ph.D. program in astrophysics. The invitation sends Ethan into a panic. “I’m here because the last family member I have left is sick!” he cries in protest.

Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock

Quiet at first, this small play crescendos to a deafening crisis. Having overheard James’s invitation, the ailing Aunt Sarah orders Ethan to move out and get on with his life. Ethan, in turn, confronts her, saying she never cared for him, from the time when he was ten years old and begged her for refuge from his addict father (she refused). Sarah acknowledges her previous failure, saying that she cares for him now—hence her insistence that he leave to start a new life.

Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock

Ultimately, this is a play about caring about people and caring for people. In the world of the play, the state of Idaho (also the playwright’s home) exudes a feeling of isolation. Names of towns like Troy, Moscow, Missoula, and Coeur d’Alene sound like remote places in a foreign land, beyond our imagination. In a telephone conversation between Ethan and James, the latter talks about the constellations he sees in the night sky, as vast and unknowable as those places in Idaho, featuring lonely characters who are desperate to connect.

Joe Mantello directs this deeply moving play with skill and exquisite delicacy. Designer Scott Pask offers a single couch on an empty stage as the only scenic element, emphasizing the isolation of the characters in the vast, empty, unknowable universe that James described during that nighttime conversation.

Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock

What happens to Ethan: does he stay, does he leave? Does he join James? I won’t reveal the final moments of this beautiful, aching play whose characters we’ve grown to care for deeply, only to say that a fourth character is introduced. She’s a nurse (Meighan Gerachis), reading aloud to her patient, the dying Aunt Sarah, who lies hidden from our view on that couch. The manuscript from which she reads—with its powerful contents—are yours to discover.

Suffice it to say, you’ll never forget the extraordinary performances of Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock, and the final Fernsby family they created together.

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photos by Julieta Cervantes

Little Bear Ridge Road
Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street
performances Tuesdays through Sundays
100 minutes with no intermission
ends on February 15, 2026
for tickets, visit Little Bear or Telecharge.com

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