It is one of the most memorable sights on Broadway so far this season: Laurie Metcalf, armed with a vacuum cleaner in Samuel D. Hunter’s play Little Bear Ridge Road.

“Armed” is truly the best description for how Metcalf wields the contraption. Her character Sarah—vexatious, hair unkempt, happiest in a fleece, scowl etched across her features—is not simply cleaning the carpet around the couch she and nephew Ethan (Micah Stock) habitually occupy in her home on the outskirts of Troy, Idaho.

The vacuuming is also intended as a vigorous emotional and practical prod directed at Ethan, and a blunt instrument of her own inner anger. You might breathe a sigh of relief when Metcalf takes the machine off-stage.

Hunter, whose plays include The Whale (later made into a movie), likes to set his dr

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