In ‘A Bright New Boise,’ Beware the Religious Fanatic in the Break Room

The break room in a workplace is a place of partial, momentary escape from the grind. The relaxation, eating, bitching, gossiping time is all-too-brief, your workplace is just beyond the door, and the presence of management—on noticeboards, or the hovering human clock-watchers in charge—is all around.

The break room at a Hobby Lobby store in Boise, Idaho is the setting for Samuel D. Hunter’s Obie Award-winning 2010 play, A Bright New Boise, and is no such refuge. In the revival currently playing at New York’s Signature Theatre, to March 12, the at-first-unassuming Will (Peter Mark Kendall) is trying to both escape and find something—if he doesn’t break himself in the process, that is. Initially he seems folded in on himself with shame.

Within Wilson Chin’s well-imagined, numbly plain set, the thing Will is trying to forget in this banal place is a terrible scandal at an evangelical church he was a member of. The thing he wants to reclaim is a relationship with his son Alex (Igancio Diaz-Silverio, drily surly and spiky) who he gave up for adoption 17 years previously. Alex nervously contemplates his overtures, both personal and religious.

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