The Whale A Bright New Boise

Acclaimed for his gentle, complex characterizations, Samuel D. Hunter's bighearted and funny plays explore the quiet desperation running through many American lives. The Whale tells the story of a six hundred-pound shut-in's last chance at redemption and of discovering beauty in the most unexpected places when he reaches out to his long-estranged—and severely unhappy—daughter. Hunter's second piece, the Obie Award-winning A Bright New Boise, is a philosophical investigation of faith and search for meaning in rural Idaho where a disgraced evangelical is forced to take a minimum-wage job at the local Hobby Lobby craft store in an effort to reunite with his estranged son.

Four years ago, Bryan abandoned his labor of love, a newspaper for truckers. Now he's returned - with no world of where he's been - and things have changed. His former lover is filled with rage, his new coworker is filled with incessant adoration, and his paper is filled with personal ads. As he considers giving up for good, Bryan searches for what he couldn't find on the road: a way to keep faith in humanity.

In the basement of a small evangelical church in southeastern Idaho, a group of young missionaries is preparing to go to the Middle East. One of them - a young man who has recently lost his father - has bought a one-way ticket. But his plans are complicated when his estranged sister returns home and makes it her mission to keep him there.

In a tucked away corner of North Philly, six regulars gather at a neighborhood watering hole. Over twenty years, they turn their collective memories into a vivacious mythology. The tales they’d rather forget, however, keep sneaking up and tapping them on the shoulder. At Daphne’s Dive, an aloe plant, a girl’s sneaker, a stiff drink, and mounds of trash become talismanic treasures to a group of outsiders trying to be “in” together.

When you emerge from this impish comic playwright's glittering tribute to Molière, written entirely in verse, your head will be so dizzy with syncopated rhyme that you'll almost expect to find yourself speaking and thinking in chiming couplets...[Ives] add The truism that families come in all shapes and sizes is illuminated with haunting beauty...in this exquisitely wrought comedy-drama...a piercing portrait of the contemporary social architecture, in which the distance between people can be widened or collaps

Alice and Connor sit by their roadside stand selling cheap fireworks while developers swallow the land around them. Promised a condo in the new development, their future is secure. Enter Marnie, Alice’s long-lost granddaughter, proposing to buy the land to save her family’s legacy. Marnie and Alice will become reacquainted with each other’s deeply held secrets, uncertain pasts, and hopeful futures. Hunter, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship recipient, explores the emotional frontiers of a family struggling to make a home in the vastness of the American landscape with affection, poignancy, and a profound sense of empathy.

This modern riff on the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman follows Everybody (chosen from amongst the cast by lottery at each performance) as they journey through life’s greatest mystery—the meaning of living.

Typescript, dated [Draft 5.1] 12/5/19. Typescript lightly marked with pencil by videographer. Used by The New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive on Jan. 19, 2020, when videorecording the Lincoln Center Theater stage production in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater,150 West 65th Street, New York, N.Y. Set in Greater Clements, Idaho, the drama opened Dec. 9, 2019, directed by Davis McCallum.