Trucking is a great subject for a play — “breaker breaker,” colorful personalities, the lure of the road and all that.
Yet “The Few” is strangely uninvolving, its intriguing potential subsumed in a story about reconciliation.
We expected more from Samuel D. Hunter, a 33-year-old playwright with a soft spot for outcasts — he gave us 2012’s critically acclaimed “The Whale,” about a 500-pound man desperately trying to reconnect with his daughter before he dies.
Like most of Hunter’s work, “The Few” is set in Idaho, this time in the shabby office of the title’s newspaper. A gruff woman in her early 40s, QZ (Tasha Lawrence), and her geeky assistant, 19-year-old Matthew (Gideon Glick), keep the rag alive with personal ads for truckers.
We’re in 1999, before that stuff migrated to the web, and the practical QZ doesn’t mind allocating most of the pages to those ads — we hear several, left by drivers on the paper’s answering machine.
But this switch to paid content feels like a betrayal to the weather-beaten Bryan (Michael Laurence), back after being AWOL for years. A former trucker himself, he had higher ambitions for the newspaper he helped create: It was meant to be “something for the few of us who need it,” as an old editorial put it. “Something to remind us, the few of us who live this way, that we still exist.”
Hunter writes beautifully about fragile loners. His affection for those on the edge feels true, whether they are lone wolves like Bryan, who are longing for affection, or shy gay teens like Matthew.
But the story doesn’t go anywhere as the pair keep rehashing their past over and over. QZ remains in a state of snappy impatience throughout, which doesn’t give Lawrence much to play against.
Hunter opens things up a bit toward the end, but the show has been stuck in neutral too long to successfully take off.