I wish I knew about apple cultivars like I wish I knew about flags, military patches, architectural details, and other symbols of esoteric history. Because knowing about those things isn’t limited to the object itself; it’s also about the story and people behind it.
E.M. Lewis’ Apple Hunters!, which opened at Artists Repertory Theatre over the weekend, is about four men in search of a rare apple. Of course, they’re actually searching for what it represents: youthful friendship and vulnerability. But they can’t talk about that, so they look for the apple.
It’s become a truism that men can’t talk about consequential things directly. Instead, they talk about flags, fruit, and architectural details. So it’s fitting that one such conversation, overheard at a barber shop, launches the premise of Lewis’ play, when Eddie (Phillip Ray Guerva) learns about a “lost apple” and recalls a tree from his childhood that fits the description.
Somewhat unusually, he’s still the ringleader of his now-grown friend trio, and they still see one another regularly. Don (Henry Noble) is a happily married wife guy. Stan (Fiely Matias) retains what appears to be a lifelong nervous energy. Eddie himself is recently divorced and just lost his mother to prolonged illness. His older brother Paul (Andrés Alcalá) had been her primary caretaker and now lives in a crushed emotional state after enduring a spate of tragedies.
These are slim pickings for characterization, but the play runs just 70 minutes, and Lewis still covers a good amount of story. Action and background unfold economically, with multiple narrators and fluid, short scenes. Ingeniously, the barbershop setting is conveyed with just the buzz of an electric hair trimmer.
The entire cast is strong and Guerva provides a wonderful center—Noble is deeply likable and Alcalá is appropriately painful to watch. Most often, Matias assumes the script’s extra roles, which fits with his character’s fidgety humor. He signals transitions with changes as small as donning a wig or apron. The actor seems especially gifted at small movements that convey volumes. While playing an older woman, advising the friends on their apple quest, he places a hand on Paul’s arm with a gesture that says: This is hard, and you’re a good son.
Apple Hunters! succeeds most where it is subtle and falters where it is loud. An emergency room scene clashed with the overall tone. Nostalgic reminiscences of summertime swims in a creek felt hackneyed—or worse, yet another thing to distract from the present and the real. We were surprised to find that the most ham-fisted line, delivered at the play’s climax (“Maybe we’re not supposed to be rocks—rocks shatter.”) isn’t actually in the script. This points to another interesting side of Apple Hunters! The work is still in process—and part of local festival of new works, Fertile Ground.
Artists Repertory’s defining feature is its devotion to contemporary plays and its long history of commissioning and guiding new works to production, so it makes perfect sense for the theater to continue to embrace and overlap with Fertile Ground. Almost every year—excluding the construction and pandemic years—the LineStorm Playwrights conduct script readings at Artists Rep. In 2022, Apple Hunters! was one of them, though that year’s readings were held online.
At the end, with a little surprise horticultural technique, Eddie and his friends become the story and people behind a symbol that gives it meaning, even if they still seem stuck in an unhealthy repression to blowup emotional loop. I’ll leave you with this actual theatergoer quote: “Men would rather hunt apples than go to therapy.”
Apple Hunters! plays at Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison, through April 26, $5-$60, tickets and showtimes at artistsrep.org, content warnings for death and self harm
