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The action is even set in a coyly generic "Italian" (quote marks come free with ticket purchase) restaurant that screams Olive Garden, even though the chain is never mentioned in reference to this specific locale within the Idaho city that gives the play its title. (The cavernous but gorgeous set, by Lauren Helpern, is meticulous in its straight-faced-parodic faux-faux-Tuscan appointments.) So cunning are Hunter and his director, Davis McCallum, in rustling up the mass-produced details—the condescending "Famiglia Week" sign! the breadsticks!—that the entire 100-minute evening unfolds like an elaborate joke about certain dining destinations in the New York Theatre District, from someone who knows better to someone who knows better. That, alas, is all Pocatello is. If Hunter sends regular signals that he's trying to pen a profoundly scathing indictment of Middle America, similar to his play The Whale, which Playwrights Horizons produced two years ago, he overplays his hand at every turn. Certainly there's a place for such a work, even multiple examples (Eric Bogosian's 1994 Suburbia, revived at Second Stage eight years ago, is another), and a thoughtful dissection of how corporate falsity is eating the center of the country alive would be of particular worth now, as such issues—viewed from every possible perspective—seem to be on everyone's lips these days. But Hunter's interest is so limited in scope and execution that what's onstage comes across as little more than a frothing rant. The manager of the restaurant, Eddie (T.R. Knight), is a once-upon-a-time brilliant kid who's wasted away his life and his family in this latest in a string of dead-end jobs that's apparently putting him on the same track as his father, who committed suicide a number of years ago. Eddie is estranged from his family, though by no one's conscious choice: His brother, Nick, got out and is selling real estate in St. Paul, and can't bear the thought of coming back; and their mother, Doris, never having recovered from her husband's death or Eddie's coming out as gay, wants nothing to do with the place at all. Though he's committed to rekindling bonds, by tricking Nick (Brian Hutchison) and Doris (Brenda Wehle) to come visit him, Eddie's also hobbled by the impending closure of his unprofitable eatery. He hasn't yet told his employees they have less than two weeks of salary remaining. Max (Cameron Scoggins) is a criminal drug addict who's working here because he can't get a job anywhere else. Isabelle (Elvy Yost) is listless and ambitionless, an orphan (her parents died in a car accident) who's working here because she has to do something. Troy (Danny Wolohan) is at war with his alcoholic wife, Tammy (Jessica Dickey), and is trying to keep their daughter, Becky (Leah Karpel), away from her; Tammy has her own problems, forced to provide emotional support for Troy's dementia-riddled father, Cole (Jonathan Hogan), while Troy is at work. And did I mention that the restaurant's food literally makes people sick? It does! Doris won't even look at it because of the gluten (Eddie is out of the gluten-free pasta), and Becky is so obsessed with where its ingredients come from—and does she ever find them wanting—that in the opening scene, when the two families collide during dinner, she vomits it up onstage. Hunter comes closest to sympathizing with Becky, painting her as the only one who gives a thought to the concerns of the outside world, and his writing for her reveals a genuine sense of social conscience that seems intended to be the drama's fuel. (She gets suspended from school for showing classmates Google-unearthed photos of the 1937 Nanking massacre.) But Becky, like everyone else, is defined exclusively by her discontent. It's difficult to spend nearly two hours listening to characters who don't have much to express beyond their hatred for themselves, for each other, and where they live if they don't bear some qualities that can redeem or at least temper them in our eyes. None of that is allowed through: The only person with a vaguely positive outlook, Nick's wife Kelly, is constantly griped at by others and played by actress Crystal Finn as borderline autistic. Knight plays Eddie's naïveté to the hilt—a major risk, given how smart Eddie supposedly is—but because everyone onstage reviles Eddie for one reason or another, no one takes even the earnest version of the man seriously. Hunter and McCallum, who provides a staging that's at once intense and restless, push everything so far that you're unable absorb any substance that may exist in Hunter's argument; you just want to get away from these people, most of whom have chosen or are choosing to be miserable. Though Knight underplays Eddie's pain as much as he can, making an elegant attempt to hide it beneath a convincingly unconvincing sunny exterior, you're always aware of how hard he's working just to maintain a watchable, sensitive core. None of the other actors accomplishes as much; their portrayals are, strangely, all brittle, jittery, angry, and impatientseparate extensions of the homogenized personality such a distressed community imposes on its inhabitants, I assume was the goal. By treating these characters in this fashion, however, Hunter and McCallum fail to elevate their work above what they're criticizing. Rather than show how real lives are being eviscerated by cookie-cutter retailers squeezing the soul out of their homes and bodies, they're content painting the city's inhabitants with a single, broad, dehumanizing brush: unworthy of possessing dreams, hopes, fears, or love, and essentially deserving their own destruction. Olive Garden may or may not be what's wrong with America, but it's not exactly clear what Pocatello offers that's any better.
Pocatello
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