![]() “If you look at a lot of the ways that religion works in modern areas-it’s about defeating it or getting out or letting your eyes open to a wider world. “Isn’t it funny that The Whale was a provocative play in 2010-and, now, it is a provocative movie in 2023?” he continues. ![]() I think it made me realize that that kind of faith exists at the cost of people like me and people like Charlie, which is a hard thing to realize. The tragedy of all of this is that-within the community and accepted within the community-there was this one thing about me, the fact that I was gay, which just knocked everything to the ground. I think that I had an appetite for it as a child because I have always been interested in the divine and had a really strong faith in God. “When I was in high school,” Hunter recalls, “I went to a Family Christian School for over four years-till I was outed, and then I went to public school. For the first time, I accessed elements of my past that had to do with self-medication. I was writing someone 10 or 15 years older than I was, and I was thinking of him as 10 or 15 years younger. I started a script about an expository writing teacher named Charlie, but it just wasn’t feeling right. At first, he says, “the only thing personal about that play was that I was teaching expository writing then and struggling to connect with my own students. It was triggered by that “very unexciting” life his student is living. The Whale is perhaps his most revelatory work. “I’ve never written anything directly autobiographical, but there’s pretty personal stuff in just about all of them.” “There’s a lot of auto-fiction going on in my plays,” Hunter confesses. Hunter drew his characters and the ambience from his own stint as a 17-year-old Walmart clerk in 1998, which should explain the authenticity of the barbs and naughty palaver bouncing off the walls. ![]() ![]() From left: Eva Kaminsky as Pauline, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio as Alex and Peter Mark Kendall as Will in ‘A Bright New Boise’ at Signature Theater. Alex is an unforgiving, mean-spirited sort, so, while their domestic drama is the main event, comedy from their three co-workers abound. The new worker-arrival is Will, trying to win back paternity points from the teen cashier, Alex, a son he abandoned because of a religious cult. Their inaction is confined to the store’s break room, which is every bit as bleak and bland as the people who shelter, and idle, there. It’s the rule that his Boise characters live by-clerks going through the empty motions of their dead-end jobs at a Hobby Lobby craft-supply chain store. ![]()
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