The work of Samuel D. Hunter might feel like a throwback, but his principal dramatic subject is a timeless one — human relationships. His plays track the myriad ways people reconfigure one another, at work, at home and in the local community.
The malleability of identity is depicted in provincial settings in the American West, where there often isn’t a full menu of lifestyle possibilities and the passageway between religious conformity and stigmatized outcast status can be exceedingly narrow. Hunter is clearly interested in more than the catalytic effect of divergent psychologies. In plays such as “The Whale,” “Pocatello” and “A Permanent Image,” he closely examines the sociological landscape, the way economics and culture constrict and magnify, imprison and potentially liberate this thing we call the self.
“Clarkston,” now having its West Coast premiere in an Echo Theater Company production directed by Chris Fields at Atwater Village Theatre, is about two co-workers at Costco whose wounds speak to each other more profoundly than their stark superficial differences. Chris (newcomer Sean Luc Rogers, making a memorable first impression) has been working at the Clarkston, Wash., store for a while.
He grew up just over the border in Lewiston, Idaho. (Hunter wrote “Clarkston” to be part of a double bill with “Lewiston,” another compact drama, though they’re standalone plays and don’t need to be seen together.) Chris is more or less at home in that h.