‘Pocatello’ conveys stress of change in small town

“Pocatello” is The Actors Group’s third play of the season, and the third with a theme of family dysfunction.

The season opened with “The Crusade of Connor Stephens,” about a right-wing preacher at severe odds with his gay son. That was followed by the Sam Shepard classic “True West,” pitting two brothers in a diabolical standoff. “Pocatello,” which opens Friday, presents two families in the throes of disintegration.

At the center of the chaos is Eddie, played by Justin Strain. Strain made his stage debut as the bottled-up gay son in Connor Stephens, and here he finds an even richer venue to explore depth of character.

Eddie is the manager of a failing Italian restaurant in Idaho’s small town of Pocatello — a gentle, likable guy who’s attempting to please his fussy family as well as the miserable relatives of his longest-standing waiter, while simultaneously juggling curveballs thrown by troublesome staff members.

All he really wants is to bring his family together and to boost sales for the restaurant, so he’s planned “Famiglia Week.” Yet a warm gathering remains elusive.

The woes of the restaurant and the two discordant families reflect the pressures of encroaching modernization in small-town U.S.A., as strip malls and big-box corporations loom.

Eddie himself, full of heart and a can-do mentality, is a metaphorical stand-in for a simpler, more personable way of life, but he’s confronted at every turn by a bombardment of contemporary issues, from gluten-free demands to employee drug use.

“It’s been phenomenal watching Strain grow and find his character,” said director Brad Powell. “He questions everything.”

THE PLAY’S boisterous scenes, with many of the cast’s 11 actors on stage, sometimes all talking at once, are interspersed with quieter moments where just two or three are seeking common ground.

At one point, Eddie finds himself in an unlikely face-off with a precocious teenager. She’s riddled with angst over society’s many ills, from the Nanking Massacre to hormone and pesticide use in today’s food.

Eddie and the teen are arguably the most intellectually vibrant characters in the play, and both are overlooked by their own families.

In each other, they find a human connection, something the untethered characters in this play all crave, but can’t seem to grasp.

Among the cast are experienced actresses who haven’t appeared in a performance for years, and students new to the community theater stage.

“Both groups come with a love of theater,” notes Powell, who’s been working to bring the two smoothly together.

POWELL HAS returned to direct for TAG for the first time since 2015. While he once directed most of TAG’s plays, and the Brad Powell Theatre is named for him, he’s been working with other companies and in theater choreography more recently.

When he got wind of “Pocatello,” however, he knew he had to bring it to TAG. Both he and playwright Samuel D. Hunter were born in Idaho — and Powell was actually born and raised in the town of Pocatello.

The characters and plot don’t jibe with Powell’s experience of Pocatello, he said — but the town’s background does correspond to the overarching theme.

The heart of the old town Powell knew as a child is now dead, having given way to a thriving community built on corporate business.

“The more we delve into it, the more we find, whoa, it’s not as simple as it seems at first,” Powell said. “There’s some really heavy stuff going on.

“What it tells us is that the similarity of family problems is universal.”

Many of Hunter’s characters are dismally lonely, yet moments of connection offer seeds of hope.

At curtain’s close, it’s up to the viewer to consider whether the two families are going to continue in their rut — or rise above it.