Laurie Metcalf to Star in Broadway Play Produced by Scott Rudin

“Little Bear Ridge Road,” Samuel D. Hunter’s acclaimed small-cast play about loneliness, compassion and a search for connection between an aunt and her nephew in rural Idaho, will come to Broadway this fall in a production starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock.

The production, directed by Joe Mantello (“Wicked”), will mark the return to Broadway of the producer Scott Rudin, who in 2021 paused his producing activities and resigned from the Broadway League amid reports of bullying behavior toward assistants and others.

Rudin is producing the show with Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who has frequently backed his shows.

The play is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 7 and to open Oct. 30 at the Booth Theater for an 18-week limited run.

Hunter, the playwright, is best known for “The Whale,” which was adapted into a 2022 film. He was raised in Idaho and many of his plays are set there and feature socially isolated working-class characters. This will be Hunter’s first play staged on Broadway.

“My initial impulse for writing the play — which I told to Joe and Laurie, and I credit them that they still had faith in me after I said this — is that I wanted to write a play about people watching television,” Hunter said in a telephone interview. “That was the platform for the play, but the play became this story of this aunt and this nephew who have almost no relationship, and a lot of painful history between them, hunkering down together during the pandemic, and both of them trying to figure out a path forward in a deeply complicated reality.”