Where Hope Isn’t What’s for Dinner
Ben BrantleyDecember 15, 2014: Toward the conclusion of Samuel D. Hunter’s Pocatello, an old-fashioned drama about dead-end lives, an unhappy restaurant manager played by T. R. Knight laments the interchangeability of American towns. He describes the monotonous vista he sees driving home — punctuated by the sights of a Starbucks, a Walmart, a Burger King — and says wearily, “I don’t know where I live anymore.” At that moment, I couldn't help identifying with this sad sack, and not just because Mr. Knight seems so emotionally invested in his role. All through the production, which opened on Monday night at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Davis McCallum, I kept envisioning a similar terrain. But my landmarks weren’t chain restaurants and big-box stores. Instead, I saw books, movies and plays stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century, dotting an unending plain of small-town American loneliness: works like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; William Inge’s Picnic; the film of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show; and Neil LaBute’s Reasons to Be Pretty. The melancholy ghost of Inge seemed especially present. And there were moments, whenever a contemporary reference like Best Buy or Applebee’s came up, that I found myself startled to realize that we weren’t back in the conformist heyday of Inge and Eisenhower. Pocatello suggests that while the brand names may have changed, the blues sung by quietly desperate middle Americans still have the same old lyrics. Listen, for example, to the plaint of an alcoholic housewife, portrayed by Jessica Dickey, who married young and now sees that her chances of escaping from her straitjacket marriage are slim: “I mean, there are plenty of unhappy people in the world. Why should we be the ones who get to be happy?”
READ THE REVIEW