Ben
Brantley

June 7, 2015

Small-town blues were once a dominant melody line in American drama. Their sound was probably most pervasive during the mid-20th-century, when the tear-splotched plays of William Inge ruled Broadway. But such works, set in small lonely pockets of a big, gregarious nation, have never entirely left us, even as the kind of parochial world they portray is fading into oblivion. And lately there seems to have been a resurgence of this wistful genre, in which an aimless United States finds its mirror in a host of rudderless characters in increasingly peripheral places. Annie Baker, whose marvelous Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Flick” has been revived in Greenwich Village, is the style’s current poet laureate. But you can find plenty of other contemporary examples, like Samuel D. Hunter and Lucy Thurber, who convey quiet desperation in the provinces with varied pitch and shadings. Kate E. Ryan’s “Card and Gift,” which opened over the weekend at the Wild Project in the East Village, makes its own, self-effacingly oddball contribution to this mini-renaissance. Part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series of new plays, this gentle, meandering comedy portrays three woman marking time in a dying business in a dying New Hampshire town, in the midst of a presidential primary.