Brendan Fraser left this production of “Grangeville” about a month before the show began performances. The reason given: “unforeseen circumstances.” There is another warning sign, and it comes early in Samuel D. Hunter’s play, which opened Monday at the Signature Theatre.
Jerry (Paul Sparks, taking over for Fraser) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith, who looks like a young Fraser) are long-estranged half-brothers who haven’t met face-to-face in years. Because of their mother’s deteriorating health, Jerry phones Arnold to give him an update. Children taking care of their ailing parents is only half the story here. The more intriguing narrative is how decent people sometimes need to get a divorce from their terrible relatives.
Jerry and Arnold not only have different fathers, they appear not even to have the same mother. Arnold is an artist who’s gay and living with his husband in the Netherlands. Jerry is a blue-collar loser with two kids who’s breaking up with his wife in Grangeville, Idaho, where both he and Arnold shared a gruesome childhood in a trailer. Arnold is well-coiffed. Jerry sports a scruffy beard and a baseball cap, which should be red but isn’t. The one brother is well-traveled, obviously; the other has never been out of America. Jerry keeps talking about the superior intelligence of his young brother, but when Arnold makes a very gross observation that’s completely out of character for such a refined and articulate man, Jerry responds that he doesn’t get “the metaphor.”
The metaphor?
What degree in English Lit does Jerry hold that Samuel D. Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has failed to tell us about? That’s the problem with so many playwrights who go slumming in what they think are the lives of ordinary Americans.
The first third of “Grangeville” takes place in phone and Zoom calls, and small slips of language aside, it is riveting theater to watch these two very different brothers go at each other long-distance. Hunter captures Arnold’s need to break from a family that treated him abominably. It’s no wonder why he put an ocean between himself and Jerry, not to mention Mom. For the first 18 years of his life, Arnold found himself trapped in a small canoe with a bunch of creeps with whom he shares only one thing: blood.
Perhaps Hunter is too successful in making vital bodily fluids irrelevant.
The second third of “Grangeville” begins with the introduction of a new character. She is Jerry’s wife, and she is played by Smith, whose idea of playing a woman is to play an effeminate gay guy. Later, Sparks gets his chance to be double-cast, too, when he portrays Arnold’s husband. Sparks has the advantage here, because the husband sports a thick Dutch accent and doesn’t speak English very gut. Otherwise, we learn next to nothing about either the wife or the husband, who are there in the role that psychiatrists often play in second-rate plays and movies. By asking questions, these shrink-like character deliver a lot of exposition and allow the main character to spill his guts.
“Grangeville” wraps with one of those heart-warming “The Subject Was Roses” endings where everything is forgiven, if not forgotten. Arnold would be better off holding a grudge.
Jack Serio directs.
