Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
If you know Samuel D. Hunters work, overwhelming realism is what youd expect.
Youll see it all in this play a relatively early work that premiered at the Wild Project in 2010.
(Back then, Scott Browncalledit a simple, superb little heartland heartbreaker.)
But soon, he starts to act in his own strange ways.
He approaches a teenage employee named Alex (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) and announces that hes his biological father.
We eventually learn that the work is about the coming apocalypse.
Watching Will is a little like observing theproverbial frog in a pot of boiling water.
Oliver Butlers direction keeps things briskly ordinary and shot through with dread.
Wills extremism is maybe a reasonable outgrowth from circumstances such as these.
Hunter wants you on the fence with rapture on one side and boring old wage labor on the other.
Were at a time of potentially peak Samuel D. Hunter.
But the film tries to put the metaphor first, so theres no space for the characters to breathe.
The world is closing in, choking them both.
I get panic attacks over nothing, Alex says at one point.
That the panic comes on from the crushing nothing of it all is what links father to son.
They both cant bear thenow.
Spend enough time in a break room, and youll want it to be consumed by flames too.
A Bright New Boiseis at Signature Theatre through March 12.
