Pocatello is the third “Idaho” play by Samuel D. Hunter which Rogue Machine has introduced to L.A. audiences (the others being A Permanent Image and A Bright New Boise). Unfortunately, the finale is the weakest link in the otherwise award-winning trilogy, a heavy-handed portrait of life in a “nation-wide Italian restaurant franchise in Pocatello, Idaho.” Eddie (the estimable Matthew Elkins) is the manager of the restaurant (brilliantly reproduced in Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s set), which has been failing for some time. Hunter would have us believe that the blame lies with the corporatization of America: i.e., competition from chains like McDonalds and Papa Johns. But that reason doesn’t fly in light of the fact that Eddie’s restaurant is corporate-owned, rather than a mom-and-pop operation. It’s Goliath rather than David. The employees of the restaurant include Troy (Justin Okin, a meth-head battling to overcome his addiction; Max (Trevor Peterson), a white-collar exec reduced by economic hard times to waiting on tables; and Becky (Eden Brolin), a rebellious teenager who hates the world and everyone in it. The patrons are an equally unpleasant lot. Most of them, to accommodate Hunter’s plot, are relatives of the staff members. Nick (Rob Nagle) is Eddie’s brother, a successful real-estate agent who fled the dying Pocatello years ago and is here on a visit with his wife Kelly (Rebecca Larsen). Nick loathes Eddie with a passion that’s never satisfactorily explained by the playwright, who only alludes to some terribly dark thing that happened in the past (which does not, however, have anything to do with Eddie’s homosexuality). The other relatives include Eddie’s grandpa Cole (Mark L. Taylor), an Alzheimer victim; and his grandma Doris (Anne Gee Byrd), who can’t stop kvetching about the absence of gluten-free dishes on the menu. Eddie, a warm-hearted, compassionate and decent fellow, fights with all his might to keep the restaurant alive, even to the extent of putting his own money into the kitty. He also tries to be a mother-hen to all the badly-flawed, messed-up chicks who enter his coop. But because Hunter wants the restaurant to stand as a metaphor for the collapse of the American Dream, there isn’t much resilience or hope to be found in Pocatello That said, the play is extremely well acted by the hard-working cast, who manage to find glimmers of humor and poetry in the largely grayish text.
