Clarkston review: quiet power in Samuel D. Hunter’s small-town drama

★★★★

Not every play needs to shout to be heard. Some have a measured dignity, burning slowly and lingering long after the lights go down. Clarkston, directed by Jack Serio, is one of those rare works. Written by Samuel D. Hunter, it feels like a modern Pacific Northwest Chekhov, with the brooding introspection of Thomas Mann.

Jake (Joe Locke), who has fled his family to follow the Lewis and Clark trail, carries the weight of Huntington’s disease and the knowledge of a foreshortened life. In small-town Clarkston, Washington, he finds work stacking shelves on the night shift and meets Chris (Ruaridh Mollica). Their tentative friendship blossoms into love, though Chris, who is openly gay, faces the hostility and small-mindedness of a town unwilling to accept him. His relationship with his mother, Trisha (Sophie Melville), only adds to the weight he carries as she is a recovering addict whose return to old habits exposes wounds that never quite heal.

Hunter’s writing draws out extraordinary stillness. The play begins with a gentle awkwardness that feels charming and true, before deepening into reflections on mortality, love and relapse. Locke is magnetic in his shy, fumbling warmth; Mollica conveys a quieter, more haunted resilience, shaped by shame and rejection. Melville is outstanding as Trisha, her relapse portrayed with devastating complexity: guilt upon guilt, undercut by flashes of longing for connection and motherhood.

Milla Clarke’s stripped-back design lines the stage with warehouse shelving while onstage seating presses the audience into the characters’ world. The lighting, by Stacey Derosier, avoids theatrical flourishes. Stark factory whites and jaundiced yellows wash the space in an unforgiving glare, heightening the sense of ordinary lives lived under extraordinary pressure.

Clarkston is a slow burn, a work of subtle power and piercing honesty. By its end I found myself in tears, not because it shocked, but because it moved with such clarity and truth. In a theatre landscape so often distracted by spectacle, Clarkston proves that the smallest stories can cut the deepest.