The American Dream doesn’t usually come shrink-wrapped, but in Clarkston it sits under the harsh glow of Costco strip lights, somewhere between bulk cereal and small-town despair. Samuel D. Hunter’s play isn’t about chasing freedom so much as searching for identity—and it shows that even in a warehouse built for bargains, self-discovery comes at a cost.

It is a play centred around the growing relationship which blossoms between Jake (Joe Locke) and Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), both drifters in their own way thrust together on the Costco night shift. Both are complex and grappling with their own problems, eventually finding solace in each other. Jake, from a privileged background, is wrestling with a terrible, terminal, diagnosis, and finds himself in Clarkston on the trail of intrepid American explorers, and distant relatives, Clark and Lewis, inspired to reach the West Coast. Meanwhile Chris, firmly on the breadline, is an aspiring writer, struggling to come to terms with his own sexuality and the draining demands of maintaining a relationship with his addict mother Trisha (Sophie Melville). 

Locke offers a great deal to Jake. When tapping into the inevitable vulnerability of a character devastated by their diagnosis, Locke’s subtle gestures and quivering vocals, when needed, remind us of Jake’s suffering. Yet Locke also does not define the character with this, with Hunter’s writing giving Jake a nervous awkwardness that is immediately endearing. His cradling of the journals of Lewis and Clark are tools for quick snippets of humour, and these help to layer a character that could so easily be defined by a single trait. Hunter’s work is clearly a modern take on the American Dream, using the story of Lewis and Clark as a wider metaphor for the lacking sense of self Jake, Chris and many modern Americans face, with Locke bringing to the fore Jake’s growing resilience effectively. 

Alongside Locke, Mollica’s Chris is a much more complex and intriguing character. A lot is going on here, arguably too much. Chris’ character is pulled in too many directions, insecure about his sexuality, his writing career and his anxieties about his mother, leaving an inevitable breakdown looming. When it eventually does come, Mollica is particularly impacting yet the character’s collapse, and their on-off relationship with Jake suffers from the play’s breakneck speed. Nevertheless, it is hard not to be swept up by Mollica’s portrayal, in particular during his final encounter with mum Trisha. 

The play focuses a great deal on the two boys, yet Melville’s fierce depiction of the awful addict Trisha is effective. Trisha’s letting down of Chris is predictable, yet Melville’s depiction of a cruel mother, controlling and domineering, warped by years of drug abuse, is striking. 

That said, the play is undone by its speed. Everything just happens a little too fast, and nothing is given enough time to breathe which ultimately is a little too reductive by the piece’s climax. Tonally, there are a lot of nice moments but the swings from moments of lyrical, emotive, dialogue to more blunt exchanges are a little too sharp, not helped by some momentum-breaking scene transitions. It is not helped by the onstage seating, which offers very little, and one wonders whether a play that so focuses on intimacy is a little lost in this theatre. 

But, there is enough in this 90-minute play to keep things interesting. The decision to set it in Costco, a symbol of modern consumerism and faceless capitalist America is a nice contrast to the romantic frontiers that Jake pines for. The play’s use of Lewis and Clark as a metaphor for the self-discovery Jake and Chris undergo is on the nose, but the neatness of the plot is appreciated given the brief run time. 

By the play’s ending, all three characters reach a destination, but what lies ahead for Jake and Chris in particular offers a hope for the pair not too dissimilar from the epic explorers that inspire Jake in the first place. The events in this play are more memorable for the characters in it, than those watching, yet there is enough in Clarkston to provoke its genuinely moving conclusion.