TRYING TO MAKE LIFE BETTER AT ANY COSTCO
Head north to the small town of Lewiston, Idaho, and you’ll discover how the town got its name. One of the town’s main attractions is the Lewis and Clark Discovery Center. Located along the banks of the Snake River, the center chronicles the journey of 19th-century explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Right across the Snake River is Clarkston, Washington, which also owes its name to the famous pair. I’ve been there, and it’s basically the same town separated by water.
Prodigious playwright Samuel D. Hunter‘s play duet Lewiston/Clarkston takes place in this area, each city a modest drive from the playwright’s hometown of Moscow. While both saw individual world premieres as standalone works, the “play in two parts” can be presented in the same evening (first done at Rattlestick Theatre in 2018). Each play addresses the same question — that of the legacy of the great American push west — in different ways, with Lewiston focusing on the past and Clarkston on the future. Echo Theater Company is offering the West Coast premiere of Clarkston, yet another Hunter portrait of hinterland culture which is a heartbreaking examination of isolation, one which represents the author’s own confrontation with what spurred him to abandon his roots and embark on his own search for an elusive happiness.
Hunter‘s plays are often set in small-town Idaho in a business district where big-box stores and chain restaurants represent our loss of identity as Corporate America gobbles up the land even as we gobble up Corporate America’s offerings. And, as with his other scripts, Clarkston is pocked with palatable truisms about connection, vulnerability and hopefulness. It’s also smart, sad, and inquisitive (one character states, “It’s a terrible time to be alive. There’s nothing to discover”). And while there is usually a lead gay character in Hunter’s works, Clarkston has two: Jake (Michael Sturgis), with a degree from Bennington in Post-Colonial Gender Studies, is fully out with parents who were “hyper-okay” with his coming out (“like to the point where it was a little annoying actually”). Chris (Sean Luc Rogers) is still stuck on that journey.
But Chris, who is a night stocker at Costco, where much of the 90-minute one-act takes place, has much more to attend to than coming out. A would-be writer, he hopes to get into a prestigious writing program at a university in Iowa. This would mean leaving his mother (Tasha Ames), a recovering meth user who has done some awful things to her son in the name of a fix. Although they haven’t lived together since drugs began taking over her life, they have deep emotional ties to each other. In the Costco parking lot, Trisha makes repeated attempts to re-establish their relationship. She swears that she’s off drugs, has rid herself of the men in her life, and is doing much better at Denny’s, where she works as a waitress. Chris, who has heard all this before, isn’t convinced.
Into this mix comes Jake, brand new in town from Connecticut, trying to complete his first late-night shift as a Costco employee under the direction of the more seasoned Chris. A very distant descendant of William Clark, Jake’s a bit obsessed with his ancestor, reading his writings with all the reverence one might read a Bible or a book of poetry — he even quotes parts of the explorer’s diary from memory (Chris — hardly impressed by Jake’s family tree — mentions that William Clark was a slave owner, which is only one of the explorer’s unseemly traits). Jake is running from an illness that threatens to take his life before he’s ever really lived it, and from overbearing parents who just want to help in the only ways they know how.
Aside from Hunter’s incredibly naturalistic dialogue, it is the wonderful, natural performances from the three actors that make this a winning outing. No one overplays their hand, striking such a nice balance that you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation. Rogers, in a remarkable professional stage debut, and Ames bring the fraught mother-son relationship to life believably, but it is Ames, a regular on L.A. stages, who is especially heartbreaking. Sturgis, as he was in Echo’s Gloria and Poor Clare, is a wonder. He listens as if for the first time to his fellow actors, resulting in a performance that is uplifting and exquisitely melancholic at the same time ’” all while being quite funny. A scene where Sturgis’s Jake reacts to Chris reading a spooky story out loud is priceless.
Thank artistic director Chris Fields, who consistently elicits amazing performances with his company. I wasn’t quite as sold with the minimalist setting, which has the two men rolling a pallet and a large Costco steel storage shelf on and offstage. Scenes in the parking lot can be stagnant and are tough to buy as a location; there is no sense of place. The design of dull forest-green mesh curtain panels slowly drawn to the center between scenes makes sense at play’s end, but they are unattractive. Yes, the play’s the thing, but the setting looks cost-cutting instead of creative. And the use of Stephen Stills’ solo song with acoustic guitar, “4 + 20” (from the 1970 Crosby, Stills, and Nash album Déjà Vu) is a perfect choice (“Why am I so alone?”), but hearing it between every scene change makes it less and less powerful.
Still, Clarkston is real in ways that can be difficult to capture on the stage. Hunter (A Case for the Existence of God, A Bright New Boise) stays true to his style with a deeply human play in which we witness the mundane drama of life and how those around us are going through things we might never suspect or understand. He universally catches that we are all explorers of our own futures, much like Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the American West. So what if someone has carved the road you are on? What matters is that you have the fortitude to make your own journey.
photos by Cooper Bates
Clarkston
Echo Theater Company
Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave.
Fri & Sat at 8; Sun at 4; and Mon at 8
ends on October 21, 2024
for tickets (pay-what-you-want thru $38), call 747.350.8066 or visit Echo Theater