SUPBERB PLAY BY SAMUEL D. HUNTER, “GREATER CLEMENTS” AT LINCOLN CENTER THEATER

With: Edmund Donovan, Andrew Garman, Nina Hellman, Judith Ivey, Kate MacCluggage, Ken Narasaki, Haley Sakamoto.

Nothing compares to a play that takes you away from your present reality into the lives of others where you cannot look away.

Set designer Dane Laffrey cleverly utilizes a multi-level mining elevator to frame the set, reflecting where the action takes place in the lives of people from a town known for coal mining. “Greater Clements” steadfastly held me in its grip exploring the lives of its characters for an easy three hours. The audience becomes entangled with two unforgettable families. Samuel D. Hunter once again placed his drama in his native Idaho in a little American town, which has come to an impasse like so many places, whether rural or cosmopolitan, that have changed radically from familiar community to obsolete entity of history. Becoming obscure to itself and lost in memory even while still occupying the same streets by its inhabitants. Corporations and gentrification have worn the red, white, and blue patina of self-made America into one big gray blur of an identity crisis.

In “Greater Clements,” the ever amazing, authentic, spot-on Judith Ivey plays Maggie, who has spent her life in the town. She runs the Coal Mine Museum where her father and about eighty others were burned to death in 1972 during a conflagration so sinister it left nothing but ashes and a watch that had…