A Bright New Boise: A Moment Of Human Connection

An interview with A Bright New Boise playwright Sam Hunter and A.R.T. Institute dramaturg Amanda Martin.

Amanda Martin: Like many of your plays, A Bright New Boise is set in Idaho. Other than growing up there, what draws you to Idaho as a writer?

Sam Hunter: I started writing plays set in Idaho very early on. My sophomore year of college I wrote this drama about a family living in a trailer in a small town in Idaho, and something just kind of clicked for me. Idaho was really comfortable for me to write about, and it’s become a canvas that I really like returning to. It’s not that I sit down and think, “OK, what’s the new play about Idaho, what new part of the Idaho experience could I excavate with this play,” because none of these plays are quintessentially Idahoan. A play like A Bright New Boise is deliberately set in a big box store that could be anywhere in the country.  One of the reasons I keep returning to Idaho is that it feels so familiar to me, and the only way I can write a play is by dropping in with the characters emotionally. I’ve tried writing the other way, from a distance – and there are so many great films and plays that feel like they’re looking at characters through a microscope, examining them – but I’ve found that I just have to write from the inside out. I can’t write any other way, and placing them in Idaho just allows me to do that immediately.

AM: Boise is one of your earlier plays. Could you talk about the process of finding your voice, and how you think you’ve developed as a writer since Boise?

SH: Boise was a real turning point for me. Before that, the kinds of plays I was writing had more stylistic gestures and formal gymnastics. I was trying too hard. I knew what my voice was, but I was searching for the container for it. Boise and The Whale were the first time I calmed down and just told a story. I wanted to streamline things and create a kind of play that was simpler in its design and execution. And what I found is that when I wrote Boise it allowed me to focus on the emotional lives of the characters in a way I hadn’t before. But, Boise was difficult to write. It was one of the first times I really had to be vulnerable as a writer, because I was looking at something that was really deep and personal within me. And I think that’s the track that I’ve been on ever since. The way that I ground myself emotionally in Boise, with these questions about God and faith and spirituality in the very unlikely container of a big box store, has manifested in many different ways since then in my writing. But if there’s one common thread through all of the plays, it’s that I have these people sort of desperately reaching out for another person on stage, just for a moment of human connection or empathy, and sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t.

AM: Absolutely. Boise seems to focus on the need for that interpersonal intimacy, despite taking the form of a play about fundamentalist Christianity.

SH: Right. I don’t really think of this as some topical play about fundamentalist Christianity. I think that in a really human way, the play is just about somebody who can’t negotiate his internal life with his external life. Throughout the play, Will is desperately trying to connect with people in this horizontal way, this human to human way, but he can’t negotiate the presence of the divine as he sees it in his mind. The story of somebody’s internal life in conflict with their external life is not a new story, it’s a deeply human story. As far as where religion in the play came from, I frequently write about religion. I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school, so there was a period of my life where pretty much all my friends and mentors were fundamentalists. I had a very complicated experience with it, because this was also the time of my life when I was realizing I was gay, and my critical sensibility was starting to develop. I would be at school with my friends and I would have these really big, and sometimes very complicated and troubling conversations about God and faith, but at the same I was working my first high school job at a Walmart. And that tension between the divine and the banal is really what informs a lot of my plays. It’s one thing to have a conversation about God in a church, but to have a conversation about God in the break room of a big box store is something entirely different. And maybe the discussion is actually more clear and more necessary when it’s in the break room. Because it’s in those really quotidian moments, those almost oppressively banal situations in your life, that I find myself looking to God or the spiritual life because that’s when I need it most.

AM: That’s a big part of Boise’s beauty – how you’re able to bring intimacy and spirituality into this very contained place where it doesn’t make any sense, where it’s nearly forbidden. Something else that’s fascinated us while working on Boiseis that, while it takes place in two very ordinary places (the break room and parking lot of a Hobby Lobby) and deals with very real questions and problems, there’s also something that extends beyond realism, or naturalism.

SH: I’ve never really written a naturalistic play in my life, and I think people get frustrated when they try to experience my plays as naturalism. I’m not altogether concerned with believability. There are some very monumental gestures that happen in this play: eye surgery going on a television while this person’s inner dogma is being unleashed in a fury of rhetoric. You can understand it within a realistic context, but it certainly doesn’t look or feel like naturalism. That’s what I’m really interested in: places that look ostensibly realistic and exist inside the arena of realism, but go someplace larger, a little more mythic. But in a delicate way, the turn is delicate.

AM: Other than trying to fit your work into a naturalistic frame, what other traps do you think an actor or director working on your plays could fall into?

SH: A lot of the plays I’ve been writing recently, A Bright New Boise included, are about people who are easy to dislike, and are easy to judge, and I think the only absolute necessity of any production is that you don’t make fun of the characters or keep them at a distance. Once you say, “this is how a fundamentalist Christian would act” or “this is how a troubled teenager would do a scene,” it becomes phony in an uninteresting way. Boise is a play about human connection and the moment you push the characters into caricature or judge them from a distance, the play loses integrity.

AM: You just won a MacArthur genius award and are pretty busy these days – where can we look for you next?

SH: I’m doing a show here in New York at Playwright’s Horizons called Pocatello, which opens in December so we’re going into rehearsal for that in just a few weeks. I’m about to workshop two plays in the Bay Area that don’t share characters but are in are in conversation with each other, one called Lewistonand one called Clarkston. They’re both small, quiet, very contained character dramas, and they’re both vague examinations of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but they’re not history plays by any means. Clarkston is set in a Costco in Clarkston, Washington, and Lewiston is set in a fireworks stand off of a highway in Lewiston, Idaho. They’re about these people who are trying to figure out who they are in the broader legacy of the Lewis and Clark expeditions, and what it is to live in the West in 2014.

Amanda Martin is a first year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.