Laurie Metcalf bares her soul in moving Broadway play

Actress Laurie Metcalf and playwright Samuel D. Hunter are a match made in Middle America. 

There are few writers who can sublimely craft, and without any condescension, powerful stories set in flyover country as well as Hunter, whose searing “The Whale” was made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Brendan Fraser.

And Metcalf, although a rockstar of the New York stage, still explodes with the ferocious Midwest edge she sharpened for years at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. The “Roseanne” actress is never less than nuclear.

Both artists, in the best sense, feel like out-of-towners with a lot of punchy truths to lay on the out-of-touch.

At the Booth Theatre, Hunter and Metcalf — H&M — have finally teamed up in “Little Bear Ridge Road,” an intimate Pacific-Northwest-set drama about lonely, struggling souls that opened Thursday on Broadway. 

It’s a hard-hitting, hard-laughing show that combines topics that you arrive at the theater not itching to confront — the COVID pandemic, meth addiction, health insurance, shift pay — into an absorbing story you leave wanting much more of.

About the rocky reunion of a strong-minded Idaho aunt who holes up in a distant house in the woods and her 30-something gay nephew, an unsuccessful writer who’s come home after losing his dad, “Little Bear” isn’t so much a living-room play as a Lay-Z-Boy play.

A his-and-her’s reclining couch on a wheel of beige carpet is the only scenery, and the estranged pair bond and spar over that most hot-button of subjects: TV shows.

You know the fights. Was that series finale pretty good? Or was it the most disappointing hour of television the world has ever experienced? “Game of Thrones,” “Lost,” “Seinfeld,” you name it. 

That’s a more novel idea to explore than you’d think. The theater usually does a fine job of pretending that TV is, at best, a passing fad, when it’s really the national pastime. That’s how people connect now, like it or not — by disconnecting.

Sarah fits Metcalf like a couch cupholder fits a McDonald’s fountain Coke. She’s a hospital nurse whose at-home bedside manner could be described as: Needs work. 

Her default gruffness, though, conceals wicked smarts, a knack for mischief and a keen eye for what makes people tick. The RN is a real nuisance alright, but we love her all the same. Metcalf is uproariously funny and bruisingly honest in the part. Every dart Sarah throws hits the bullseye.

Stranger — to my mind, admirably so — is Micah Stock’s awkward Ethan, who’s reluctantly back in a town he hoped to never step foot in again. A loner of a younger generation, it wouldn’t be surprising if the oddball worked the afternoon shift at an arcade, chuckling at his own jokes until he clocks out. 

But Ethan is not a wallflower either. His insecurities, typical millennial ones, manifest themselves in a big, eccentric, self-deprecating personality. And expressive Stock stands up well to Metcalf — you can’t very well cower next to Laurie — despite some weighty emotional outbursts not quite ringing true.

Stock is at his best with John Drea, who makes a splendid Broadway debut as James, a compassionate grad student Ethan starts dating. 

A stunner of a scene between the two that demonstrates Hunter’s piercing understanding of normal people is a meant-to-be-encouraging conversation about receiving extra money from parents. What’s $100,000 from a house sale? It could cover the rent for a year. The hopeful chat warps into a venomous attack that makes the audience sweat bullets.

“Little Bear Ridge Road” spans 2020 to 2022 — remember that romp of a time? — and Joe Mantello directs the action sleekly and simply without obnoxious indicators of passing years, like fake snow or a changing wall calendar. The actors, making subtle adjustments in physicality and demeanor, have got that covered.

And then comes the ending.

Clever Hunter toys with the idea of controversial TV finales with the last moments of his play. It’s a talker, that’s for sure. People have debated the coda with me since I first saw it at Steppenwolf more than a year ago — like it’s Episode 86 of “The Sopranos.”

Rather than blacking out with finite closure or a “Little Bear Ridge Road” bear hug, Hunter lands on a thoughtful, open-ended suggestion that Sarah and Ethan really loved each other all along, in their walled-up way, and the nephew will eventually figure his life out.

In short: Don’t stop believin’.