Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road,” directed by Joe Mantello at the Booth, on Broadway, is a small, quiet drama set in a large, quiet corner of the country. We’re somewhere in rural Idaho, far from light pollution and the people who cause it—and, even if you’ve never been up among the Idaho buttes, this vision of a dark, empty world may feel familiar. Hunter conceived much of “Little Bear Ridge Road” during the pandemic, and the show’s vast stillness, more than the actors in masks brandishing sanitizing wipes, evokes that isolating era.

It’s 2020, and Ethan (Micah Stock) has come back home to sell his late father’s house. Ethan can’t grieve, exactly; the two hadn’t spoken in years, their relationship shattered by his father’s decades of drug use. But Ethan is nonetheless adrift: he’s left an abusive boyfriend in Seattle, and his plans to be a writer have come to nothing. When he drives up the remote Little Bear Ridge Road to check in with his estranged aunt, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), she brusquely installs him in her guest room. Two COVID years then come and go in odd hops and skips, the passing months registered by the undulating stream of television shows they watch together. (Hunter captures how slippery time felt in that period—infinity measured out in season finales.)

Hunter was raised in Moscow, Idaho, not far from the setting of Sarah’s house. A gifted realist and an excavator of a particular American loneliness, he often names his slice-of-alienated-life plays after towns in his home state: “A Bright New Boise,” “Lewiston,” and the recent “Grangeville,” which premièred in February at the Signature. For “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which was originally a commission for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and now marks Hunter’s Broadway début, he pushes another pin into the map, though I can’t find an actual street by that name. Perhaps this pin is just off the map, at the border where a remembered landscape shadows into something like a Beckettian here-but-not.

Scott Pask’s set is certainly severe enough for a Samuel Beckett play: it’s a circle of white carpet in an expanse of black emptiness, furnished only with a faraway ceiling fan and a huge, plasticky gray couch. When Sarah and Ethan sit on this bulbous seating system to watch TV, they look like astronauts readying for launch. Their existence is suspended, lunar, and bleak, though there is, they agree, a beautiful night sky. “Yeah, well, we got a good view up here,” Sarah says grudgingly. Ethan’s new boyfriend, James (John Drea), is—in a rather tidy coincidence—an astrophysicist in training, and, at one point, the scale of the glittering universe sends Ethan into a panic attack. “The, like, whatever, galaxy is like right there,” he says.

Hunter wrote the play specifically for Metcalf, and Sarah is an unforgettable character, a no-bullshit pepper pot who’s most exasperated when she feels the tug of sentiment or, worse, need. Metcalf rarely jokes but is always hilarious. The best moments of the play consist of her exquisitely timed physical reactions, like her eye roll at learning that James is from Coeur d’Alene, which, I guess, does sound suspiciously fancy and French. Sarah has been hiding a cancer diagnosis; she doesn’t want help, though, which is lucky, because Ethan barely knows how to give any. Sarah couldn’t save him from his grim upbringing, and now, past thirty, he seems arrested in the childhood he never had. Stock lets his mouth go slack and tugs at his drooping pants like a toddler.

The play operates best as a fine-grained character study, but its thinnest element is Ethan’s relationship with James, an oddly two-dimensional figure whose devotion becomes bizarre in the face of Ethan’s petulance and insults. I wondered if James’s saintliness represents another aspect of our lost COVID years, when intense relationships blossomed out of nothing. Hunter is interested in what flawed people can offer one another, the difference between saving and helping. There’s another dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning implied here, too: “Little Bear Ridge Road” is Hunter’s second play this year that suggests ambivalence about mining one’s background for material. In “Grangeville,” a sculptor wants to stop building miniatures of his home town, even though they’ve made him famous; in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” Ethan says that he quit writing autofiction because “I realized I didn’t like my main characters.” There’s a whole world of self-doubt in that sentence, a fear of something deeper than even the endless sky.

For just three days, during the Powerhouse: International festival (held at Powerhouse Arts, in Gowanus, Brooklyn), the Brazilian artist-writer-performer Carolina Bianchi also navigated elements of autobiography with palpable ambivalence. But “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella,” a transgressive performance-art piece that was one of the major productions at the 2023 Festival d’Avignon (and was co-produced in Brooklyn by L’Alliance New York), addresses this tension with a searing blaze of anger and despair. In performance art, the lines between reality and pretense are different than those in conventional theatre. A performance artist might inflict real injury on herself, for instance, and that can be unbearable to watch or, as I’ve realized, even to remember.

The beginning is almost professorial. Bianchi, dressed in a white suit, strolls onstage with a microphone, sometimes sitting at a table to consult a stack of papers. She starts with an art talk in Portuguese, showing us slides of a quartet of Botticelli paintings: “The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,” from 1483, inspired by a story from Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Nastagio, a jilted lover, is sulking in a pine forest when he witnesses an “infernal hunt” in which a knight chases and kills a naked woman. The pair are actually already both dead; the pursuit recurs on a kind of Sisyphean loop, an eternal torture for the woman who dared to reject the knight’s love. Nastagio then throws a banquet in the forest, inviting his former beloved so that she can witness the “hunt,” which duly terrorizes her into marrying him. In “The Decameron,” this counts as a happy ending; Botticelli’s paintings were likely commissioned as a wedding gift.

Bianchi connects Nastagio’s tale to countless true stories of violence against women, including the 2008 rape and murder of the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, appalling femicides in Mexico and Brazil, and oblique references to Bianchi’s own traumatic experiences. As she lectures, we watch her mix herself a cocktail laced with sedatives––referring to it as a Goodnight Cinderella, the Brazilian nickname for a drink spiked with date-rape drugs. Once the drink takes effect and she falls asleep, a downstage screen drops away and we see a nightmare landscape with a car parked near piles of sand containing partly buried skeletons. Even though Bianchi is silent, her words continue to flash on another screen—musings about art, misogyny, the use of rape as a tool in war, and a description of something that happened to her a decade ago that she can’t quite remember. Members of Bianchi’s company, Cara de Cavalo, emerge, and, as they dance and sing, they use Bianchi as a kind of delicate prop: they caress her, or shut her into the trunk of the car, or—carefully, tenderly—cut away her underwear and appear to insert a camera into her vaginal canal. The sight of the inside of a woman’s body, which plays on yet another screen, is undeniably shocking yet paradoxically reassuring; Bianchi might actually be demonstrating for us that, in an upside-down, terrible way, her only “safe space” is in the hands of her company.

It feels somehow disrespectful to write about this show as a “show.” It’s one of the most astonishing and harrowing pieces I’ve ever seen, but I also find myself desperately wishing Bianchi would not perform it. Beneath the dread of hearing her many accounts of horrific violence lies a persistent fear that Bianchi is wounding herself irreparably with these serial druggings, and that, because we are her audience, we are complicit. Bianchi is Nastagio, summoning others into the woods; she is the naked woman in danger; and she is also the knight, who wields the weapon. But we are the guests at Nastagio’s feast—the people who watch rather than rush in to help. ♦