“Lewiston” Asks The Big Questions

We’re on a patch of sand next to a local highway outside of Lewiston, Idaho. There’s a wonderfully gaudy, yet nearly defunct fireworks stand to the left of us. It’s right before the Fourth of July, but there isn’t a customer in sight.

Nearby, Alice and Connor, two people old enough to be grandparents, are testing some of their supply. It gives off a few sparks, just sputters and fizzles out.

“It makes me want to move to Canada,” Alice says.

Lewiston — celebrated playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s latest work, enjoying its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre until May 1 — is a funny and sad look at a fractured family in rural Idaho that also isn’t afraid to ask some hard questions about some long-cherished national myths.

When the play opens, Alice (Randy Danson) has been selling off the land outside Lewiston, Idaho, that’s been in her family for generations. As developers turn the family’s old ranch into condos all around her, Alice is living on the last 20-acre parcel with her ​“roommate” Connor (Martin Moran); the plan is to sell that, too, and move into one of the condos that will be built on it, poolside if they can swing it.

In the meantime, Alice runs a nearly-defunct fireworks stand that’s having a rough go even right before the Fourth of July, while Connor makes ends meet working in a Walgreens. They’re in front of the fireworks stand bickering when Alice’s 24-year-old granddaughter Marnie (Arielle Goldman), whom Alice hasn’t seen in over a decade, shows up unexpectedly with a counteroffer: to buy that last 20 acres with the $30,000 she has to her name.

Alice doesn’t want to sell the land to Marnie; she wants to cash in. Marnie won’t take no for an answer. The friction between grandmother and granddaughter drives Lewiston’s plot, as we discover exactly why Alice and Marnie have become so estranged, and what happened to Katherine — Alice’s daughter and Marnie’s mother. Which is another way of saying that the play is about what the land they’re standing on, you know, means. Is it the embodiment of a painful familial history? Can that history be dealt with, and the seeds of some more hopeful future be planted? Or as Alice says early on, is it really ​“just dirt, when it comes down to it” — and can you put it behind you by just walking away?

Those are huge questions, central not only to the family in the play, but to the myth America has made for itself — the myth a lot of us learned at some point in school about, say, Manifest Destiny, the myth that carefully avoided talking too much about the genocide that idea entailed. (“History is different when you’re 6 years old,” Alice says at one point. ​“They never tell you the truth until you’re 16.”)

Hunter freights his family drama with this myth explicitly. His characters are distant descendants of Meriwether Lewis, of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. They live in the (real) town named after him. One of the characters even hikes part of the Lewis and Clark Trail from the Dakotas to the Pacific Ocean, hoping to make some kind of self-discovery before it’s too late.

In a very overt way, Lewiston is taking aim at big thematic game, which puts heavy demands on the actors to make it all work. They are up to the task. Goldman gives us an intelligent, headstrong, and ambitious Marnie, goaded by her anger at the world, her family, and herself, and not quite sure what to do with it all yet. Moran does an exquisite job of making Connor instantly likeable, and then peeling back the layers minute by minute to show the more complex character below the polite surface. But the play belongs to Danson, who embodies the shrewd, contradictory, deeply flawed and deeply humane Alice completely. Hunter gives Alice the play’s best lines. Danson nails every one. Even the unfussy set, designed by Wilson Chin, helps deliver the message. The fireworks stand is a bouquet of gaudy, threadbare patriotism, slowly being worn down by the brown earth around it. Behind it are just a few patches of grass, and in a nice touch, the stage is framed by a rusting shipping container that serves as both a back curtain and a partial wall for the characters to enter and exit the stage as needed.

But about those big questions: what does our American myth mean? What does its history mean? Lewiston has the bravery to ask but doesn’t quite give us answers, even as the characters grope for them at the end. But if the parallel tracks of family and country that Hunter lays down in Lewiston don’t take us to any particular destination, they’re still very much worth the ride getting there.

Lewiston, by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by Eric Ting, runs until May 1 at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargeant Dr. Click here for tickets.