Little Bear Ridge Road
Opening Night: October 30, 2025
Theater: Booth Theatre
Website: littlebearridgeroad.com
Set on the remote edge of a small Idaho town, LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD centers on a razor-tongued aunt and her long-estranged nephew who find themselves suddenly back in each other’s lives — two lonely souls with a crumbling house to sell and a tangled history to unravel. Bitingly funny and quietly explosive, LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD lays bare our messy, human need to reach across voids for one another, even when it shakes us to the bones.
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October 30, 2025
As played by a glorious Laurie Metcalf in Samuel D. Hunter’s keen-eyed, compassionate play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which opened on Thursday night at the Booth Theater, she is also one of the funniest and most thoroughly human characters seen lately on a New York stage.
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October 30, 2025
Little Bear Ridge Road is a quietly triumphant debut for Hunter, an American playwright who sees the country we truly inhabit, rather than the one we like to imagine we do.
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October 30, 2025
Moments of big emotion in “Little Bear Ridge Road” don’t fall flat, exactly, but they don’t play to Hunter’s strengths as a writer; he’s better in small, askew gestures.
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October 30, 2025
Little Bear Ridge Road, which runs about 95 minutes (with no intermission), serves as a showcase and masterclass of Metcalf’s acting abilities and command of the stage. Over and over again, your mind delightedly switches between “She just said that!” and “She just did that!”
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October 30, 2025
In Little Bear Ridge Road, Metcalf racks up the hits with ease, though the production feels more like watching home run derby than a full game. I couldn’t escape the nagging sensation, as I watched Samuel D. Hunter’s drama unfold, that the circumstances were all arrayed too perfectly for a Metcalf showcase, that they’re too custom-fitted to her skills—that there were diminishing returns to watching her do only what she does best.
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October 30, 2025
The Orion’s Belt comments prefigure all sorts of big discussions to come about cancer and meth addiction and child abuse. They are the same tropes that other, lesser playwrights stick in their plays to give them meaning. Myself, I was happier when “Little Bear Ridge Road” wasn’t pretending to be anything more than a hilarious comedy about yet another dysfunctional family.
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October 30, 2025
This production, directed with superb acerbity by Joe Mantello, marks the playwright’s overdue Broadway debut, and it doesn’t disappoint. The play is a multifaceted gem, exquisitely shaped and cut, that shines out from the simplest of settings (designed by Scott Pask): a large greige recliner couch, set on a disc against a mostly black wall that doubles as a void.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2025
Hunter is a master at creating these types of indelibly flawed characters, and his sensitive writing is beautifully complemented by Joe Mantello’s typically precise direction and the superb performances from the two leads. It’s no surprise that Metcalf proves outstanding in a role that plays to her strengths portraying acerbic, hard-edged types, but she invests her turn here with sly, mordant humor that fortunately alleviates the overall grimness. Stock, who proved his comic chops with his hilarious Tony-nominated performance in It’s Only a Play, is a revelation. His work here is on the broader side, his voice and mannerisms pitched to the extreme. But he boldly lays bare Ethan’s despair, especially in a moment toward the end in which he fully reveals a heartbreaking, childlike vulnerability.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2025
Now that I am done telling friends to grab tickets to Little Bear Ridge Road, let’s tell you about Samuel D. Hunter’s latest drama, which opened on Thursday at the Booth Theatre. Little Bear Ridge Road is a touching, quietly lovely play about a few lonely people tentatively—and painfully—making emotional connections. The intimate 95-minute work is sensitively interpreted by Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock, and others in a fine, strategically understated production keenly directed by Joe Mantello.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2025
If you are someone who finds it hard to talk about personal feelings, or love someone in that category, especially if that someone is in existential crisis, you will likely find this play very moving. Even by Metcalf’s lofty standards, this is one stunner of a performance. I’ve seen it twice now and it has only deepened. At one point, a moment I don’t want to spoil with more detail, Sarah’s pain gets vocally manifest in a great, guttural howl, or it would if Sarah could sufficiently unblock her voice.
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October 30, 2025
Actress Laurie Metcalf and playwright Samuel D. Hunter are a match made in Middle America. There are few writers who can sublimely craft, and without any condescension, powerful stories set in flyover country as well as Hunter, whose searing “The Whale” was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Brendan Fraser. And Metcalf, although a rockstar of the New York stage, still explodes with the ferocious Midwest edge she sharpened for years at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. The “Roseanne” actress is never less than nuclear.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2025
Little Bear Ridge Road is a superbly acted and achingly poignant 90 minutes of theatre. The characters may feel alien to each other and even themselves, but they’re messily, sometimes infuriatingly, and altogether relatably human.
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October 30, 2025
By the end of Hunter’s taut and quietly searing drama, we would certainly miss them. Not because they are what most anyone would consider likable — the story’s pair of reluctantly reunited family members are, to themselves and to each other, largely insufferable. But they grapple with existential anxieties that most people lack the courage to face. Spending time with them means confronting our own shadows and asking some of life’s most nagging questions.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 30, 2025
It’s one of the many small, revealing moments in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” the latest quietly amusing and powerfully affecting drama by Samuel D. Hunter, a playwright making his long-deserved Broadway debut. Like the many excellent plays I’ve seen Off-Broadway written by Hunter over the past dozen years, all of which are set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho… “Little Bear Ridge Road” somehow transforms what seems to be a simple story about ordinary people into a cosmic contemplation of loss and hope.
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October 30, 2025
This is a gorgeous play — unassuming and concise but emotionally expansive, attentive to its characters’ interior lives as much as their quotidian routines. Mantello, with his customary economy and laser focus, is similarly alert to every detail, spoken or unspoken. Watching Metcalf vacuuming in angry silence after a tense conversation with Ethan is both darkly funny and poignant. Their bits of business with the reclining couch and its elevated footrests and tray table are a comedy of accidental domesticity.
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