QZ (Lawrence) is running a newspaper known as “The Few” which was once a source of comfort and connection for truckers in the region.
#THE FEW SAMUEL D HUNTER WINDOWS#
The year is 1999 we know this by Dane Laffrey’s impressively detailed set complete with clunky CRT monitors running Windows 98 screensavers. Hunter’s mechanisms and plot devices get in the way occasionally, but the attention to characterization keeps us transfixed with the trio through the end. Together with McCallum's direction and Hunter’s intimate and textured dialogue we get characters that are instantly recognizable and yet a world away. It has kept two of the same actors (Gideon Glick and Michael Laurence), and is rounded out with the addition of Tasha Lawrence (also from The Whale). The Few comes to Off Broadway via a production at the Old Globe in San Diego.
#THE FEW SAMUEL D HUNTER DRIVERS#
With The Few, now playing at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in a methodically directed production by Davis McCallum (director of The Whale), Hunter explores the lives of three people connected through a newspaper for the loveless and lonely truck drivers that pass through their small Idaho town. It’s his nuanced crafting of isolation and his empathy with characters on the fringe of American affluence. There’s something about Hunter’s Northern Idaho roots that transcends to stages in New York and elsewhere. As the playwright of last season’s award winning play The Whale, he mined the life of a morbidly obese gay online English professor living in the same portion of the country.
Specifically, he knows loneliness in Idaho. Photo by Joan Marcus.īOTTOM LINE: A captivating portrait of the lonely life of people who write about the loneliness of truckers who sometimes swerve off the road. Michael Laurence and Tasha Lawrence in The Few.
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place Hunter opens things up a bit toward the end, but the show has been stuck in neutral too long to successfully take off.By Samuel D. QZ remains in a state of snappy impatience throughout, which doesn’t give Lawrence much to play against. His affection for those on the edge feels true, whether they are lone wolves like Bryan, who are longing for affection, or shy gay teens like Matthew.īut the story doesn’t go anywhere as the pair keep rehashing their past over and over. Hunter writes beautifully about fragile loners. “Something to remind us, the few of us who live this way, that we still exist.” A former trucker himself, he had higher ambitions for the newspaper he helped create: It was meant to be “something for the few of us who need it,” as an old editorial put it. Tasha Lawrence in “The Few.” Joan Marcusaīut this switch to paid content feels like a betrayal to the weather-beaten Bryan (Michael Laurence), back after being AWOL for years. We’re in 1999, before that stuff migrated to the web, and the practical QZ doesn’t mind allocating most of the pages to those ads - we hear several, left by drivers on the paper’s answering machine. A gruff woman in her early 40s, QZ (Tasha Lawrence), and her geeky assistant, 19-year-old Matthew (Gideon Glick), keep the rag alive with personal ads for truckers. Like most of Hunter’s work, “The Few” is set in Idaho, this time in the shabby office of the title’s newspaper. Hunter, a 33-year-old playwright with a soft spot for outcasts - he gave us 2012’s critically acclaimed “The Whale,” about a 500-pound man desperately trying to reconnect with his daughter before he dies. Yet “The Few” is strangely uninvolving, its intriguing potential subsumed in a story about reconciliation.
Trucking is a great subject for a play - “breaker breaker,” colorful personalities, the lure of the road and all that.
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