Brendan Fraser to Star in Samuel D. Hunter's GRANGEVILLE at Signature Theatre

Signature Theatre will present Samuel D. Hunter’s Grangeville, a Signature-commissioned world premiere directed by Jack Serio (February 4–March 16, 2025). The production will star Brendan Fraser (Film: Gods and Monsters, The Mummy, The Whale, Killers of the Flower Moon; Theater: Elling, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and Brian J. Smith (Film and TV: The Matrix Resurrections, Sense8; Theater: The Glass Menagerie, The Columnist, Three Changes).
 
Throughout his career of plays set in his home state of Idaho, Samuel D. Hunter has become a keen cartographer of place and its impact on both our interior and material lives. Like Hunter’s first Signature world premiere in his Premiere Residency, A Case for the Existence of God, his latest world premiere, Grangeville, unfolds within the vast cultural space between two characters. It examines the perplexing nature of a world of virtual immediacy and growing experiential distance. 
 
Grangeville takes its title from the remote Idaho town of the same name. Across a void of thousands of miles and oceans of hurt, two half-brothers tentatively reconnect over the care of their ailing mother. Fraser plays Jerry, the older sibling—belligerent as a teenager, sensitive as an adult—who still lives in Grangeville, while Smith plays Arnold, an artist now living in Rotterdam, drawn back into his past. Their remote connection—over the phone, over video chat, with fragments of their respective contexts audible and visible to one another—collapses their physical distance while underscoring just how many social worlds apart they are. In this emotionally gripping new play, Hunter explores the fallibility of memory, the stories we tell to make sense of our suffering, and the complexity of forgiveness.  Hunter and Jack Serio collaborate for the first time for this production. 

Photo credit: Chad Griffith