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'Boise' Talk About End of World in New Rogue Machine Play
Everybody's favorite up-and-coming L.A. theater company, Rogue Machine, has hit pay dirt again with the highly dynamic West Coast premiere production of Samuel D. Hunter's Obie Award-winning play "A Bright New Boise."
Most of the action takes place in the dingy employee breakroom of a fictional arts and crafts superstore's Boise, Idaho outlet, where a TV monitor incessantly runs a satellite feed of two nerdy corporate headquarters types boosting the company's products—except, occasionally, when the broadcast signal gets crossed with another station showing a 24/7 program lineup of grossly graphic live surgery footage.
Into this hopeless environment enters Will (Matthew Elkins), a middle-aged gentle giant who gets hired for a minimum-wage, no-benefits register job and meets his co-workers. One of them is Anna (Heather L. Tyler), an attractive but insecure single woman who hides amid the merchandise at closing time so she can sit alone in the breakroom after hours and read trashy, violent books. And then there's the impetuous teenager Alex (Erik Odom), an aspiring performance artist and contemporary music composer, prone to panic attacks and inclined to use "I'll kill myself!" as a figure of speech when he gets upset. Just a couple of minutes after they meet, Will informs Alex he's his biological father.
Will himself is fleeing from a recently scandalous past after the head pastor of a fundamentalist church in which he had also played a leadership role was arrested for causing the death of a teenage congregant. And while Will wasn't personally implicated in that boy's demise, his close association with the sect is something he is reasonably trying to hide. Much of the drama in Hunter's play emanates from the evolution of our understanding as to whether Will has abandoned, or at least sufficiently softened, his hard-line religious convictions so that he might accept Alex and Anna's halting overtures to bring him into their lives.
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But Will is clearly torn between the opportunities presented to alleviate his own piercing loneliness on the one hand, and, on the other, his unshakable conviction, even his abiding hope, that the Rapture, the visiting of divine destruction upon us all, is imminently approaching.
Elkins takes the character of Will, who could be played as little more than a one-dimensional religious fanatic, and exposes the raw inner conflict between the character's desperation for human connection and the hold that his entrenched beliefs still maintain on him. Taylor's Anna, too, is winsome in her readiness to find in Will a potential soulmate despite all his obvious instabilities. As Alex's fiercely protective adoptive brother, Leroy, Trevor Peterson perfectly modulates the pitch between his distrust for Will and his love for Alex, while also sensitively portraying an artistic temperament just too young and cocky not to realize that his future is less than bright in Boise.
Rogue Machine Artistic Director John Perrin Flynn uses the smallness of the theatre's 40-seat adjunct performance space to considerable advantage, mining our close proximity to the very good cast of this production for substantial tension and pathos.
The show's unusual start times also make it surprisingly easy to see this one without impinging on other weekend plans. And it really is very much worth seeing.
"A Bright New Boise" plays Saturdays at 5 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. and some Mondays at 8 p.m. through December 9. Full-price tickets cost $33 ($30 at the door), with discounted tickets available online for $19 or $19.50.
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