“Clarkston sets out to chart emotional wilderness, but often loses its way among clunky metaphors and rushed storytelling”.
“Maybe we’re like the last American pioneers” muses Jake, a drifting young man stacking shelves at a Costco in the titular small town of Clarkston. The line encapsulates the play’s core ambition; to draw a thread between the rootlessness of modern American youth and the idealism of the Manifest Destiny era of westward expansion. But while Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston aims for thematic depth and scope, it too often opts for telling over showing – subtlety is not on the shelves here.
Jake arrives in Clarkston while tracing the historic route of Lewis and Clark, hoping to find purpose along the way. He meets Chris, a night-shift worker at the local Costco, and the two quickly form a bond over their shared sense of purposelessness and emotional trauma. Their evolving relationship is the emotional core of the play, which also weaves in Chris’s difficult relationship with his meth-addicted mother. This is a new work by Hunter, known for his explorations of isolation and working-class American life, though here the execution feels more heavy-handed.
Directed by Jack Serio, the production is mostly well executed, but not without its odd choices. A portion of the audience is seated on adjacent sides of the stage – perhaps in an attempt at intimacy – but the effect never really takes hold. Instead, it occasionally feels gimmicky rather than immersive, and is distracting in scenes that demand emotional intensity.
The pacing also feels uneven. In the first few scenes, Jake and Chris go from barely knowing each other to sharing deeply personal traumas, to a riverside sexual encounter, to an abrupt crisis point – all seemingly within a matter of hours – or at least, it feels that way, as the timeframe is never made clear. These transitions feel rushed and confusing, undermining what could have been a more organic development of connection and tension.
Ruaridh Mollica delivers a quietly powerful performance as Chris, thoughtfully capturing the character’s fragility and desperation with convincing nuance. Sophie Melville is excellent as Chris’s mother, teetering between manipulative volatility and raw, almost animal desperation – her presence is often genuinely unsettling.
Joe Locke (best known for Heartstopper and Agatha All Along) brings a quiet sincerity to the role, and his onstage presence has a natural warmth, but the emotional range required for Jake’s internal turmoil often feels muted. His frequent quoting of Lewis and Clark’s journals comes off more as a clunky narrative device than a believable character trait.
Set design and lighting work reasonably well, evoking the sterile, fluorescent world of the warehouse and suggesting something of the wider emotional wilderness these characters inhabit. That said, with part of the stage occupied by audience seating, the set never feels fully realised.
Hunter is wrestling with ambitious themes: disillusionment, illness, poverty, legacy, and the mythology of the American Dream. The writing, however, does not always trust the audience. Lines like Jake’s repeated “I’m f****d up” feel over-insistent, and much of the dialogue leans towards exposition over genuine discovery. There are flashes of real emotional depth – especially in the explosive scenes between Chris and his mother – but they’re often undercut by forced imagery and on-the-nose dialogue. The link between modern disaffection and the journey of Lewis and Clark never quite lands. It’s a metaphor stretched thin, and while it provides a narrative frame, it rarely deepens it.
Clarkston is an ambitious play that poses some worthwhile questions but fumbles in its delivery. There are glimmers of emotional truth and strong performances, but the writing too often gets in its own way. Some audience members may find themselves – like Jake and Chris – lost in the aisles of Costco, searching for a story that never quite finds its frontier.