Little Bear Ridge Road
TheaterWorks
Hartford
October 15, 2026
TheaterWorks opened its latest season with Little Bear Ridge Road, a play about two estranged family members coming together to bury a third, and the resulting reckoning about the past.
Ethan (Mishka Yarovoy), a frustrated writer, returns to his hometown of Troy, Idaho, after his meth-addicted father passes away. He stays with his aunt Sarah (Denise Cormier), who has been handling his affairs until he shows up. Ethan and Sarah’s relationship is practically nonexistent, as Ethan resents his aunt for failing to protect him from his abusive father. Ethan discovers his aunt has cancer, and decides to stick around to take care of her. He eventually meets James (Travis Anderson), and the two start dating even as they are trying to figure out their own futures. (Note: Janelle Anne Robinson also has a part as Sarah’s nurse.)
LBRR can be quite intense in places as Mishka Yarovoy embodies the arrested development of Ethan. He’s sulky, sarcastic and sometimes even mean. Yarovoy takes great care to convey these feelings without ever making Ethan truly unlikeable. In the scenes later in the play where Ethan begins having an emotional breakdown, Yarovoy makes his pain palpable. It is a vulnerable performance, and Yarovoy deserves much prise.
Cormier is on top of her game too as the same kind of dour but well-meaning person, with just a little more cynicism thanks to her age. Cormier gives Sarah a caustic sense of humor that doesn’t sand down her rough edges too much. Her monologue later in the play about her experience battling cancer as a nurse had the theater on the edge of its seats.
While James doesn’t carry as much pathos as the other characters, Troy Anderson is pitch-perfect bringing some joy and levity into the emotional crucible of the Fernsby family. Anderson’s lightness shouldn’t be confused as frivolity. In fact, the way he plays his relative normality – straightman at times, sympathetic ear at others, punching bag at still others – reveals just how damaged both Fernsbys are, and he’s the lucky one caught in the middle.
The performances are LBRR’s greatest strength, and make the play worth the price of admission. The actors keep the 100-minute runtime brisk, and bring the characters to life.
My main concern with LBRR is that it sometimes loses the present of its characters by focusing too much on the past or the future. This occurs because the main sources of conflict between the characters are events that happen offstage. For Sarah and Ethan, their conflict centers on the latter’s harsh childhood and the former’s refusal to help. There’s no dramatization of what is in fact the central relationship of the play, the triangle between the three. Ethan and Sarah just say that things were bad. But what was bad? And why was it? When Ethan discovers his aunt has cancer, that occurs offstage as well.
This dynamic plays out again when James announces that he has an interview for a graduate program. Ethan finds out at the same time the audience does, because James has neglected to tell Ethan he was applying to programs. Again, Ethan is left to react to an event after the fact, and then ratchet himself up emotionally about the idea that James might leave someday. The decisions and consequences remain offstage, and that deflates the present scene onstage.
The cast members do a great job of yelling at each other about these things, but that’s all they can do– yell. It would have been nice to see Ethan’s face when he picks up the hospital bills and realizes Sarah is dying, or watch his dread ratchet up as the day approaches when James finds out about his PhD applications. Instead, the news simply drops out of the sky onto the characters, which leaves opportunities for drama unrealized.
Little Bear Ridge Road is still an enjoyable play despite these complaints, although I think they hold a good play back from being a great one. Ethan eventually does begin writing again, and in his manuscript he admits that his family issues made him spend too much time “looking in the wrong direction.” I think that sums up LBRR well, as it spends a little too much time looking offstage.
NEXT
Little Bear Ridge Road continues at Hartford Stage through Nov. 8 at TheaterWorks.
Premiere Weekend continues when Jamil goes to see Dracula at Hartford Stage.
