The name is a clue. Not to some great twist in this all-American tale of love in the once Wild West, but to just how generic Samuel D. Hunter’s play turns out to be. What is Clarkston? Well it’s a small, dull Washington town, where the writer of The Whale sets his wistful story about two lonely lads.
Chris (Ruaridh Mollica) is teaching Jake (Joe Locke) how to stack shelves on a night shift in Costco. There are jars of luminous cheese balls bigger than a human head, giant 8K TVs, the sound of forklifts whirring in the background. That’s where the random-generic-play-generator seems to have been booted up. Two young men. One secretly gay. The other secretly with a degenerative disease. Working in a warehouse. Chris, half-closeted, has a mum who’s a meth addict. Jake is openly gay but recently diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease. We know this because he blurts out ‘I have Huntington’s Disease’ a propos of nothing three minutes after they meet.
