The few samuel d hunter drivers#

One of the many points of conflict between QZ and Bryan is his dismay at this change in the paper’s direction.

The few samuel d hunter drivers#

The answering machine is a character in its own right, as it records the yearnings of drivers and others for a human connection (one of them, “Cindy,” apparently voiced by Audrey Cefaly, is a particularly important presence). QZ has made “The Few” almost self-sustaining by changing its emphasis to print personal ads, which the trucker customers phone in to the answering machine. Andrew Flurer, Dawn Thomas Reidy, and Baakari Wilder in ‘The Few.’ Photo courtesy of Unexpected Stage Company. QZ’s anger about the course of her life, and about Bryan’s multiple betrayals, is the hallmark of Reidy’s performance. But it’s what she has, and she is not about to tolerate Bryan re-entering her life and her job without a struggle. QZ hates living where she does, never having been more than 30 miles from her point of origin. When he gets drunk halfway through the play, the despair behind his alcoholism is palpable. His pacing is spot-on throughout, never hurrying, even when the emotions among the characters are at their most intense. His physicality is slumped, his affect that of someone who life has defeated. Wilder speaks slowly, hesitantly, sometimes laconically, with spaces between his words. Then Bryan disappeared, without a word to QZ, who had been his lover, leaving QZ to try to run the debt-ridden publication by herself.Īs the play begins, Bryan reappears, suddenly and without notice, after a four-year absence. But Jim died – the terrible circumstances of his death are gradually explained as the show proceeds – and his absence does much to define who the other characters have become. Their environment, convincingly created by set designer Allison Mark and props master John Barbee, is a small cluttered office, complete with boxy computers, a printer held together with duct tape, old folding chairs, overflowing wastebaskets, and yellow sticky notes on newspapers covering the walls.īryan’s original concept for the publication had been as a forum for drivers’ stories, to help drivers – isolated in their cabs, lost in the placeless network of interstates, truck stops, and fast food outlets – find a sense of connection, so that they could retain some sense that they existed. Jim’s young nephew Matthew (Andrew Flurer) works at the paper. “The Few” is the name of a shoestring publication for over-the-road truckers, founded by Bryan (Baakari Wilder), QZ (Dawn Thomas Reidy), and their now-deceased friend Jim. Set in a forlorn, anonymous location off the Interstate in Idaho in 1999, amidst worries about the Y2K bug, before smartphones, Hunter’s script examines the relationships among three people in a place where the loneliness is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Baakari Wilder, Andrew Flurer, and Dawn Thomas Reidy in ‘The Few.’ Photo by David Lewis. Hunter’s The Few, now being presented by the Unexpected Stage Company under the sure-handed direction of Christopher Goodrich, fits into that tradition. In its low-key, deliberate way, Samuel D.

The visual emptiness of vast open spaces – think of your favorite John Ford film – and the emotional distance between people in sparsely populated places – think the plays of Sam Shepard or, for that matter, of Brokeback Mountain – makes the West a perfect place for meditations on how isolation corrodes human souls. The American interior West has long been a favored setting for stories about loneliness.