LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD, now having a sold out run at Steppenwolf, is a quintessential Samuel D. Hunter play. Like most of his work, the ninety-minute play is set in Hunter’s native state of Idaho and features characters who are in physical, psychological, and spiritual stasis. They yearn to connect with other people but can’t make the leap from self-absorption to familial or romantic love. As usual, there is a lost, gay character whose psychic wounds are not easily healed.

The lost gay character in LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is thirty-something Ethan (Micah Stock), a writer whose writing block is a symptom of his inability to make positive choices and move forward. Ethan’s favorite phrase when forced to make a decision is “I don’t know.” The only positive decision he has made is to leave his affluent, super-controlling partner. When we meet Ethan, he has returned to the small Idaho town in which he was raised to sell his father’s house. Ethan has no positive feelings about his neglectful drug-addict father. He has come to his reclusive aunt’s house to find the deed to his father’s house. Aunt Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) is a bristly woman who loved her career as a nurse, but now faces being an invalid herself. Like everything else in her life, Sarah wants to deal with her cancer alone on her own terms.

Sarah invites Ethan to stay with her for a few days. Unable to decide what to do next, Ethan is still there a year later. In the meantime, he has met and become somewhat attached to James (John Drea), a sweet graduate student in astro-physics at the university. Ethan and James met on a hookup app, but from the outset, James seeks a relationship, not just sex. I must admit that the one nagging question I have about the play is why James would be drawn to someone as emotionally damaged as Ethan. I kept wanting to yell out to James, “Run!” Ethan is all resentment: at his father for not taking care of him, at his aunt for not being willing to rescue him from his father, at his former lover for not trusting him, and at anyone who does not share his financial problems. James is connected to the world. In one lovely scene, he tries to introduce Ethan to the wonders of the night sky. Still, James is more a character foil than a fully drawn character.

Sam Hunter’s gift is making us care about deeply flawed, deeply wounded characters like Ethan. Perhaps his only hope is to become as self-sufficient as his Aunt Sarah, but she, like many of us, reaches a point where she cannot function alone. Ethan seems incapable of looking forward. Perhaps there might be healing in looking backward creatively through his writing.

LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is, like many of Hunter’s plays, an absorbing character study. It is one of Hunter’s minimalist plays. His last and possibly his best play so far, A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, required two fine actors and two chairs. LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is performed with only a recliner sofa. With the help of director Joe Mantello, the script and fine actors do all the work. Laurie Metcalf is a specialist in playing spiky characters. She allows us to understand that there is vulnerability under the hard, protective shell. Micah Stock has the more challenging role. Like many of Hunter’s characters, Ethan is a mess, but Stock makes the audience feel his pain. John Drea makes James a bit too passive, but the problem is in the writing. Loving Ethan would be a challenge. I’d like to know more about why James takes it on. Or are we to see him as one of those people who want to be settled in a relationship—any relationship? Are there no other gay men in Moscow, Idaho? James needs a bit more detail before the play goes to New York.

A minor quibble. Hunter’s titles usually hint at something about the play. LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD gives us a location that doesn’t seem relevant.

Nonetheless, LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD is a lovely, bittersweet play, an excellent capstone to a particularly strong (with one exception) Steppenwolf season. Any theatre that can give us Brandon Jacob-Jenkins’ PURPOSE followed by LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD, is to be celebrated. We’ll forgive them the amateurish, stupid POTUS. If only next season looked as promising.