Clarkston
American writer Samuel D. Hunter’s 2015 play, making its UK debut at Trafalgar Theatre, isn’t big on laughs. Heartstopper’s Joe Locke is Jake. Just diagnosed with the degenerative Huntington’s disease and dumped by his boyfriend, he’s run away to Clarkston, Washington, so named after his distant ancestor, the famed explorer William Clark (of Lewis and Clark). Taking a job at the local Costco retail store, he meets the brooding Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), who is saving to go to college while dealing with his meth-addicted mother, Trish (Sophie Melville). The pair form a complicated bond founded on a tentative mutual attraction and a sense of both being lost in their lives.
The play compares and contrasts the frontier-pushing exploration of Lewis and Clark with how people can become stuck in small-town America. At the same time, Jake’s casual disruption of Chris’s life is counterpointed by the explorers’ troubling colonial legacy in terms of the region’s Native American history. The writing pushes this larger narrative resonance to varying degrees of success as the dialogue leaves few chinks of light for its characters. Hunter’s writing is perceptive about the doubts that lurk beneath people’s hopes, but its aim at a grander poetry about life can fall short.
Locke brings a baffled consternation to Jake that occasionally deepens into something more plaintive and agonised. He shares an appropriately fragile chemistry with Chris, who Mollica portrays as someone constantly...
