American writer Samuel D. Hunter’s 2015 play, making its UK debut at Trafalgar Theatre, isn’t big on laughs. Heartstopper’s Joe Locke is Jake. Just diagnosed with the degenerative Huntington’s disease and dumped by his boyfriend, he’s run away to Clarkston, Washington, so named after his distant ancestor, the famed explorer William Clark (of Lewis and Clark). Taking a job at the local Costco retail store, he meets the brooding Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), who is saving to go to college while dealing with his meth-addicted mother, Trish (Sophie Melville). The pair form a complicated bond founded on a tentative mutual attraction and a sense of both being lost in their lives.
The play compares and contrasts the frontier-pushing exploration of Lewis and Clark with how people can become stuck in small-town America. At the same time, Jake’s casual disruption of Chris’s life is counterpointed by the explorers’ troubling colonial legacy in terms of the region’s Native American history. The writing pushes this larger narrative resonance to varying degrees of success as the dialogue leaves few chinks of light for its characters. Hunter’s writing is perceptive about the doubts that lurk beneath people’s hopes, but its aim at a grander poetry about life can fall short.
Locke brings a baffled consternation to Jake that occasionally deepens into something more plaintive and agonised. He shares an appropriately fragile chemistry with Chris, who Mollica portrays as someone constantly wrestling with themselves. It’s an effective performance for the emotionally grim tenor of the play – Chris feels like an implosion waiting to happen. The talented Melville sketches Trish in more shades than the script – conveying a powerful, self-lacerating anger in the later scenes – but still feels squandered as mainly a catalyst for Chris. However, the trio’s spiky interactions are welcome.
Director Jack Serio stages his production like a series of snapshots, with minimal music and the freeze frame effect of Stacy Derosier’s lighting. The actors often face each other from opposing corners, as if stuck to the ground beneath their feet. There’s something industrially perfunctory to Milla Clarke’s set, with its towering racks of boxed goods. It’s a world lacking much beyond functionality. The final scene suggests some hope for Jake and Chris, but the route has been pretty thankless.
