By Jackson Cooper, Staff Writer

Published in print Mar. 25, 2015

    I’m always seeing shows when I’m most vulnerable. I don’t know if it’s the time of the day—I’m completely drained at 8:00 p.m.—or that the experience of seeing a show just makes my body open up emotionally.

    After seeing over 150 plays in my 20 years on earth, I can say that each play is an experience. It’s not something you escape with; it’s something that brings perspective to your life and the world around you. The latest offering from Paper Lantern Theatre Company, Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise,” gives us a new perspective on our lives and our beliefs about it.

The play follows Will, played to restraint perfection by Lee Spencer, as he takes a job at a Hobby Lobby after a scandal at his evangelical church. He chose Hobby Lobby specifically in order to reconnect with his high school aged son, Alex, played by UNCG alum Phillip Wright.

     Along the way, Alex’s adopted  brother, Leroy, played by a no-holds-barred Taylor Hale (last seen in UNCG’s Cabaret), Anna (a wandering soul of a girl), and the manager Pauline, played by Beth Ritson, all face the hard question of reality; Does any of this matter?

      I sat watching “Boise,” vulnerable from a week of tumultuous emotions, and realizing that Hunter got it all right. These characters spend time hiding in the flower section of the Hobby Lobby just to get a moment of peace and quiet in the break room. After closing, they amuse themselves by purposefully making each other uncomfortable, and their biggest pride and joy is the store. I felt like I was in one of those movies like “Slacker” or “Dazed and Confused,” where I was watching the people I actually grew up around—people whose world is this one and this one only.

     That is not saying anything is wrong with that. Recently, an article came out about “Doing What You Love,” where the author said that working for yourself, owning your own business, or working in a creative enterprise does not make your job better (or you any happier) than the janitor who cleans floors for a living.

     Much the same, these people in the break room of the Hobby Lobby love their jobs. No one ever talks about getting out and moving to a better job. Pauline, the manager, gives a hilariously delivered monologue about how she was called in to “clean up” the store from bad management. And yet, she never says she regrets it or that she wishes she were doing something else.

     The guy who takes his job way too seriously at the Harris Teeter probably gets the same rush of adrenaline I get when I walk into an orchestra pit to watch a play, or the train conductor gets when he blows the whistle at the start of the work day. Jobs are not meaningless, and there is no hierarchy to them.

     Recently I’ve been obsessed with the connection of loneliness and peoples’ jobs. The play made me realize that the thing about people’s unhappiness (or happiness) with jobs is when they do/do not realize that there is a bright new world outside of the walls. Hunter’s play “Pocatello” is about just that; the main character, the young manager of a family Italian restaurant wants to close the shop down because he feels like he is stuck, watching life pass by.

    Both “Pocatello” and “Boise” tell us that it is okay to have these feelings because our meaning in life comes from those around us who love us—not the jobs we are so obsessed with. That’s why there are people like Hunter around to finally bring a voice to these characters.