Laurie Metcalf Is Riveting in ‘Little Bear Ridge Road’

Out past the edge of town, on her dozen acres of northern Idaho, Sarah Fernsby is doing just fine on her own, and don’t you dare suggest otherwise. She has a rifle for protection, though her manner alone could scare off anyone. She drives a truck so hulking that if she hits a large animal, it barely affects the ride.

Bulldozer aggressive, with a tripwire temper and a tendency to shout, she is seemingly unacquainted with the notion of emotional regulation. As played by a glorious Laurie Metcalf in Samuel D. Hunter’s keen-eyed, compassionate play “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which opened on Thursday night at the Booth Theater, she is also one of the funniest and most thoroughly human characters seen lately on a New York stage.

One of the most entertaining, too, despite the fact that Sarah’s habitat is entirely domestic and almost defiantly unglamorous. She lives a small life, not amped with exciting incident, unless you count the whipsaw changes to her mood. But as she says of the overwrought dramas that she flips past on TV: “Real people aren’t always desperately doing things.”

Hunter, a prolific Off Broadway playwright with an oeuvre of works set in Idaho (“A Case for the Existence of God,” “Grangeville”), is making his Broadway debut with “Little Bear Ridge Road,” which had its premiere last year at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. Its transfer declares the Broadway resurrection of the exiled-for-a-while producer Scott Rudin. (Allegations of bullying in 2021 led to widespread denunciations.) And honestly? Everything about this impeccable production, presented by Rudin and the media mogul Barry Diller, exudes the nearly flawless taste that Rudin is famous for.

A play about the poisonous effects of social disconnection and the double-edged ideal of self-reliance, “Little Bear Ridge Road” begins amid the Covid-19 pandemic, while the world is shut down. Sarah isn’t looking for company, but it shows up on her doorstep anyway in the form of Ethan (Micah Stock), the nephew she hasn’t seen in years. Wearing a pale blue face mask and keeping a cautious distance, he is back from Seattle to sell his dead father’s — her dead brother’s — house.

They are the last of the Fernsbys, these two: mistrustful loners, and sardonic as can be. Sarah, who possesses an underused capacity for kindness, is a nurse with nearly 40 years of experience and no compunction about making her colleagues cry. Ethan is a fiction writer, or means to be; he has an M.F.A. but is creatively adrift. He resents having to think at all about his father, whose addiction to meth (a rural American plague) endangered his childhood, and who last got in touch to ask for money.