‘Grangeville’ Review: Am I My Half Brother’s Keeper?

“I don’t know why we have to do this over the phone,” says Arnold, speaking from Rotterdam to his estranged half brother, Jerry, in Idaho.

That’s how I felt too, at least during the first half of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville,” a bleak two-hander named for the men’s hometown. Most of what happens happens at a distance of thousands of miles — and feels like it.

The distance might have been mitigated if Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) weren’t for the most part kept at opposite sides of a dim, featureless stage in Jack Serio’s halting production for Signature Theater. Until late in the play, the set, by the design collective dots, consists only of black walls and a janky trailer door, signifying the characters’ fractured, unsheltered childhoods. The interiorized sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and crepuscular lighting (by Stacey Derosier) lend many scenes the flat affect of a radio play.

But it’s also a problem that Hunter, often brilliant with banality, has buried the characters’ Cain-and-Abel subtext so shallowly beneath repetitive and not entirely credible discussions of their dying mother’s finances. Jerry, an RV salesman and only about 50, cannot figure out how to access her bank accounts online, let alone keep ahead of her bills and reimbursements. Arnold, a decade younger and having fled the family long since, resents being pulled back by end-of-life math. He might as well ask — though it would not be Hunter’s style — “Am I my brother’s bookkeeper?”

Yet an ancient fraternal struggle, like those in plays by Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks — and in the Bible — is what “Grangeville,” which opened on Monday, means to dramatize. Between discussions of prognoses and powers of attorney, we learn in the opening scenes how both men were brutalized by their mother’s violent husbands and her failure to offer protection. (She was often absent on benders.) Predictably enough, Jerry turned into a brutalizer too, in an effort, he now explains feebly, to help the sensitive and proto-gay Arnold survive.