Michael Sturgis and Sean Luc Rogers(Photo by Cooper Bates)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Echo Theater Company
Through October 21
RECOMMENDED
Clarkston, Washington — the latest census put the town’s population at 7161 — is located near the border of Washington and Idaho, off the banks of the Snake River. The town is named for William Clark, a historic figure whose fame, along with that of his partner, Merriweather Lewis, is indelibly memorialized in American history textbooks for the duo’s historic trek to the Pacific Ocean in 1805. On their way, Lewis and Clark and the men who accompanied them passed westbound down the Snake River by canoe, which accounts for the name of the town and that of its sister community, Lewiston, a mere 4.2 miles across the river in Idaho.
Clarkston is both the title and the setting for Samuel D Hunter’s poignant and intrinsically American play — a description that also applies to his 2012 dramedy, A Bright New Boise (exquisitely staged here in Los Angeles by director, John Perrin Flynn at Rogue Machine Theater in 2012). The two plays share a couple of traits. Both are set against the backdrop of a soulless big box store: Hobby Lobby in Hunter’s earlier play, and Costco in this one, first produced in 2015 and now receiving its West Coast premiere at Echo Theatre Company under the direction of Chris Fields. In each of these works, the main interaction takes place between employees of the store, one of whom is new in town and carrying with him a shitload of baggage to be unpacked in the course of the story.
In Clarkston, this newbie is Jake (Michael Sturgis) a vulnerable refugee from the East Coast whose need to escape his woes has propelled him to hop in his car and drive many miles west from Connecticut in four days. Part of Jake’s goal has been to see the Pacific Ocean, but tired out, he’s landed 300 miles short, in Clarkston, with a room at a hotel, and a warehouse job at Costco across the street. There he meets Chris (Sean Luc Rogers) another employee who has been tasked with training the newcomer in the uncomplicated job of loading merchandise onto shelves in the warehouse.
Chris, a kind and even-tempered person, soon discovers that Jake might not be right for this job. He has a tendency to drop things and doesn’t appear quite strong enough to do heavy lifting. It soon emerges that Jake is ill, suffering from Juvenile Huntington’s Disease, a progressive disease that affects his motor abilities, and that is likely to shorten his life. Intertwined with Jake’s physical limitations is a terrible insecurity that he struggles to disprove, not terribly successfully. Soon, Chris find himself in the role of protector and defender, a role he would as soon not have as he has problems of his own.
Chris’s woes center on his mom, Trisha (Tasha Ames), a meth head whose self-destructiveness has taken a toll on her son who now tries his best to keep a distance between himself and her. Despite that, Trisha pursues him at work, showing up to plead that he come back and live with her. Chris, meanwhile, dreams of being a fiction writer and leaving Clarkston for a prestigious writing program in another state.
The other issue Chris must wrestle with is that he’s gay — which is maybe not such a big deal in Connecticut where Jake (also gay) has left behind two understanding and accepting parents — but where Chris lives, on the Washington-Idaho border, it’s a reality he works hard to keep on the lowdown. You never know who might be watching.
Hunter’s plays are notable for the benevolent care with which he evokes his characters, and Clarkston, with its rich vein of humor and humanness, is a case in point. It’s the tender, bittersweet story of the evolving friendship between two conflicted and very different young men, set against the backdrop of the American dream, or rather Jake’s skewed version of it. By his wishful account, the nation still has a frontier; the imprints left by the footsteps of explorers Lewis and Clark still remain to be lovingly tracked. He even goes so far as to claim lineage with Clark (though that turns out to be not so very direct, stemming as it does from a cousin of his father, rather than directly from either parent). The harsh reality of an America whose promise has been swallowed up in big box stores and the crass commercialism they represent is one he can only tolerate while clutching Clark’s journals close to his chest.
Both Sturgis and Ames slip as easily into their respective roles — the agitated, anxious outsider and the troubled but desperately loving mother — as if they were tailor made — but it is Rogers as the thoughtful, savvy and forbearing Chris that is the stirring heart of this production. (If there’s an art to the understated performance, this actor has mastered it.)
The production is a spare one. Amanda Knehans’ spartan set, pervasively empty and black except for the interior scenes’ Costco shelving, captures the bleak elements of the characters’ lives. A video design conveying an alternative sense of place — the men escape to the riverbank, a place Chris earlier on tells Jake can be “very beautiful” — would have added a broader, more mellifluous dimension to a touching story.
Echo Theater Company, Atwater Village theatre, 3265 Casitas Ave., Atwater. Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm, Mon., 8 pm; thru Oct. 21. www.EchoTheaterCompany.com Running time: one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.
