Still Waiting for the Rapture

Michael Russotto, left, Kimberly Gilbert, center, and Emily Townley ride out dull jobs and lukewarm romances in Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s “A Bright New Boise.”

Some people escape the banality of everyday life with gaming; others by drinking too much gin. In Samuel Hunter’s dark comedy “A Bright New Boise,” the main character, Will (Michael Russotto), finds comfort in religion — more specifically, in fervently praying that the Rapture will happen and that he’ll be zapped away from his humdrum life.

This darkly funny musing on workplace politics and family ties isn’t out to mock the devout, but to explore how our beliefs help us — and sometimes hinder us.

In this case, we’re talking about a pretty dull existence: Will works in a Hobby Lobby store in Boise, Idaho, where his co-workers include a foul-mouthed T-shirt artist and a mild-mannered love interest, Anna (Kimberly Gilbert).

“When you’re thinking about the apocalypse, the visual antithesis is the white-walled break room of this big-box store,” says Hunter, who set the entire play in the employee lounge and the parking lot. “It makes you understand the hell and drudgery this character wants to be saved from.” By creating a character whose only chance for happiness seems to lie in rather extreme religious views, Hunter gives some insight into where fringe beliefs come from. “The idea is that the apocalypse gives this comfort to him about his control over eternity,” Hunter says.

While Will yearns for those Four Horsemen to take him away, he’s still present in the mundane world, trying to reconnect with his long-lost son and writing Christian fiction online. “There’s a real interweaving of the divine and the ordinary,” Hunter says of “Boise,” for which he won an Off-Broadway Theater Award for playwriting this year. “The play just allows both of those worlds to coexist.”

The play also contains hilarious bits about “Hobby Lobby TV,” the in-house channel which accidentally picks up horrific, graphic shows about medical procedures, as well as heartfelt discussions of what it means to be a parent, a spouse and even a churchgoer. Whether Will (or the audience) ever meets those horsemen seems beyond the point — the play is more about life than the afterlife.