Pocatello at Playwrights Horizons

Pocatello is the most recent play by Samuel D. Hunter at Playwrights Horizons. 

Eddie manages a failing restaurant in a small town suffering the fate of corporatization. The state of our nation’s economy plays a not so subtle role here as this nondescript chain, perhaps Olive Garden or something very similar, is governed by the bottom line. Technically the inciting incident is news about the place’s imminent closing. Eddie has his demons, not the least of which happen to be that he is an openly gay man in an area almost devoid of gay culture (Eddie’s mom Doris can’t even say the word “gay.”) All of the action takes place in one dining room.

Troy is Eddie’s longest employee at the restaurant. He is married to Tammy, his high school sweetheart, and is the meat in our sandwich generation’s dilemma between a bulimic 17 year old daughter, Becky, and a father who recently had been committed to the County Care facility suffering the early stages of dementia. Of course, Troy and Tammy’s marriage is in trouble. Becky wishes they would divorce and get it over with already.

Denial plays a big part in the play. Nick, Eddie’s older brother seems to be well-adjusted as he was able to move on, marry, and become a successful real-estate broker in Minnesota. He and his wife, Kelly, take every opportunity they can get to travel as far away from Pocatello as possible. The inciting incident for this play, for me, happens more than 20 years in the past when Nick and Eddie’s father commits suicide after the failure of his own diner. Nick explodes with incredulity as Eddie tries to serve a dish their father’s menu once featured.

It is clear Eddie lives in that past, pining over the old family homestead which is rapidly deteriorating on the edge of town and long since passed from their domain. He has refused to tell his employees that their livelihoods’ at the restaurant are about to be terminated. His character arc peaks quickly and as the plot unravels, so does he.

One of the most fully developed characters, along with Eddie and Troy, is Becky. She goes through the play with a traditional arc and is clearly the most changed by the end. She comes to some kind of terms with the blatant and infuriating hypocrisy of life. The scene between her and her grandfather, Cole, who just wandered out in a classic Silver Alert, and walked five miles from the home to end up in the dining room, was almost metaphysical in the way Becky changed from his touch and a kiss on the forehead. It was as if he was physically passing some great unspoken pearl of wisdom from the wise old sage whose dementia is both disturbing and enlightening, to a ferocious young spirit struggling with harsh reality.

Hunter has the ability to make you feel a part of the extended dysfunctional nuclear family. Using mostly kitchen sink realism, he engages his audience by highlighting the most disturbing aspects of any given situation…in this case two families whose sole connections is the small town in which they all once, or still, live. A few of the characters may be a tad underwritten, like Nick and his wife, or the waiter Max suffering from meth addiction or the waitress Isabella, suffering from a lack of opportunity in a small town? But they are electrons caught in the orbit around the protons and neutrons of the play. As directed by Davis McCallum, all the actors shine in their roles.

Hunter taps in to our primal attachment to nostalgia with the lightest touch of sentimentality. He reminds me of another Sam who dealt with the family drama of Americans and practically invented Heightened Realism. That would be Sam Shepard.