Little Bear Ridge Road
Wednesday thru sunday March 10—28
When an estranged aunt and nephew are unexpectedly brought back together, old wounds, sharp humor, grief, and an unexpected tenderness begin to surface. Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road is a beautifully human story about loneliness, family, and the surprising ways we find our way toward one another.
Performance Information
All are 1 pm indoor performances at Grizzly Peak Winery. Wednesdays—Sundays, March 10-28.
The performance runs 85 minutes with no intermission. $40 ($45 at door).
March 10 Preview: Discount tickets. $30
March 11 Opening: Join us after the show for wine or sparkling water and a talk back with the actors and director. Benefit for Planned Parenthood SW Oregon. $60. ($65 at door). Thursday talkbacks are $45 ($50 at the door.)
Ticket benefits and discounts: Wine Wednesdays (March 17 and 24), Talkbacks Thursdays (March 18 and 25) , Friend Fridays (March 12, 19, 26). Click here for more info. Tickets are nonrefundable and may not be transferred to a different production. You may exchange your tickets for another performance of Little Bear Ridge Road (subject to availability) for a $5 fee per order, $10 per order within 48 hours of showtime, payable at check-in. Email here. You may also donate your tickets back to the theater or transfer them to another person seeing the play on the same date.
Need access seating? The winery is mobility accessible. Arrive by 12:10 and let the reception staff know when you check in. Note that seats may be reserved as a donor benefit.
Are you a group of six or more who booked under the same reservation? We will seat you together.
Food Bank: We collect non-perishables on the patio before every performance. If you’re able, please consider helping support our neighbors in need.
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Meet the Artists
Christian Bufford (James/Kenny)
Christian is a NYC based multi-disciplinary artist who blends the lines of theater, dance and film. Rogue Theater Company credits include Belize in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (Reading). OSF credits include Larry in Fat Ham, Philmore in August Wilson’s Jitney, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Porthos in The Three Musketeers, Seaweed in Hairspray, Ensemble in Oklahoma, Disney’s Beauty and The Beast and Mary Zimmerman’s The Odyssey. Chicago credits include Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Marriott Theatre, Paramount Theatre, Black Ensemble Theatre, The Raven Theatre, The House Theatre. Touring credits include Nice Work If You Can Get It (First National Tour). Regional credits include the American Repertory Theatre, Lincoln Center, Stages St. Louis, SpeakEasy Stage Company, Riverside Theatre, The Engeman Theatre, among others. Christian is a high school graduate of the Drama school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and also holds a BFA from the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Instagram: ChrixtianDenzel
Julie Oda (Vickie/Paulette)
RTC Debut! Julie is a 10 year veteran of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where favorite roles include Sara in Stop Kiss, Sharon in Gibraltar, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Celia in As You Like It, Cordelia in King Lear, Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Malcolm and Witch in Macbeth, Thelma in The Trip to Bountiful and productions of Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Wild Oats, The Merry Wives of Windsor and the OSF Lab, among others. Regional Theatre: Satellites at Aurora Theatre, The Joy Luck Club at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, American Conservatory Theater, Huntington Theater Co., Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, LA Civic Light Opera. Off Broadway Theatre: Pearl Theatre Co., The Lark, The New Group. Broadway: Circle Repertory Theatre’s Redwood Curtain u/s, Geri. Education/Training: Mills College, B.A., American Conservatory Theater, Advanced Training Program.
Vilma Silva (Sarah)
Vilma is delighted to return to RTC for the fifth time! She previously appeared in RTC’s reading of Angels in America, Part 1, Doubt, a reading of August: Osage County, and in productions of Circle Mirror Transformation and Mala. She also sits on RTC’s Advisory Council. Most recently, Vilma appeared in Coriolanus with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Other credits include Sense and Sensibility for Great Lakes Theater and Idaho Shakespeare Festival, Old Jo and Scrooge in the McCarter Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol and King Philip of France and Lord Salisbury in King John, an all-female and non-binary production in collaboration with the Upstart Crow Collective and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Vilma has been a company member at OSF for 28 seasons, appearing in more than 50 productions. Some of her favorites at OSF include Destiny of Desire, Mojada, The River Bride, Water by the Spoonful, King Lear, Henry VIII, A View from the Bridge, The Taming of the Shrew, Gibraltar, Pericles, Two Sisters and a Piano, The Three Musketeers, and The Magic Fire (OSF/Kennedy Center). Other theaters include Steppenwolf Theatre, TheatreWorks, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Dallas Theater Center, American Conservatory Theater, El Teatro Campesino, among others. Vilma represented OSF at Ten Chimneys as the 2011 recipient of the Lunt-Fontanne Fellowship. Vilma dedicates her work to her parents Vilma Perez and Silvio Antonio Silva-Re.
Jonathan Luke Stevens ( Ethan)
Jonathan has spent ten seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where his credits include Oz in Come From Away, Demetrius and Lysander in separate productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Lennox in Macbeth, Paris in Romeo and Juliet, Link Larkin in Hairspray, and Ado Andy in Oklahoma!. Other theatre credits include Phil Davis in White Christmas (Oregon Cabaret Theatre/OSF); Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Guthrie Theater; Geoffrey in Something’s Afoot and Pepper in Mamma Mia! at The 5th Avenue Theatre; As You Like It at The Public Theater; and The Donkey Show at American Repertory Theater. Training: BFA, The Boston Conservatory; Scuola Internazionale dell’Attore Comico; New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.
Laurie Woolery (Director)
Laurie is an OBIE award winning director, playwright, cultural organizer and citizen artist who works at the intersection of theater and civic engagement. She works in theaters nationally and internationally such as The Public Theater, National Theatre (London), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory, Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Taiwan), Denver Theatre Center, Goodman Theatre, Trinity Repertory, Alliance, Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf, Cornerstone Theater Company, and South Coast Repertory. Selected projects include the rolling world premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta, Somewhere by Matthew Lopez at Denver Center, Come From Away at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Laurie’s long history with new plays includes notable playwrights like Tanya Saracho (The Tenth Muse/OSF), Charise Castro Smith (El Huracan/Yale Rep), Marisela Trevino Orta (The River Bride/OSF), Aditi Brennan Kapil (Imogen Says Nothing/Yale Rep), Maria Irene Fornes (Promenade/NY City Center Encores), Julia Cho (The Language Archive/OSF), Eliana Pipes (DreamHou$e) etc. Upcoming New York world premieres include Benjamin Benne’s Fantasma and Cusi Cram’s Blanca y Ines. Her musical adaptation of Shakespeare plays As You Like It co-created with Shaina Taub and The Tempest with Benjamin Velez received world premieres at The Public’s Delacorte Theater. In 2020, Laurie produced the documentary Under The Greenwood Tree and curated the public art installation The Seed Project on the façade of The Public Theater that featured hundreds of New Yorkers. Laurie’s long history developing new work ranges from incarcerated women, veterans, domestic workers, immigrants, intergenerational communities to residents of a Kansas town devastated by a tornado. She creates site-specific work ranging that includes working sawmill in Eureka to the banks of the Los Angeles River. For over a decade, Laurie served as Director of Public Works at The Public Theater, a program that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators. Laurie is the former Associate Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company and Conservatory Director at South Coast Repertory. Laurie is founding member of The Sol Project, 2020 United States Artist recipient, 2021 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellow, Yale’s 2021 Beineke Fellow and named Person of the Year at the 2022 National Theatre Conference.
Samuel D. Hunter (Playwright)
Hunter is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and producer whose deeply human stories explore faith, family and the American experience. In 2025, Hunter made his Broadway debut with the critically acclaimed play Little Bear Ridge Road, starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock, following its run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where it received the Jeff Award for Best New Work. He simultaneously made his West End debut with Clarkston, starring Joe Locke, which received a WhatsOnStage Award nomination for Best New Play. Hunter’s works include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award), A Case for the Existence of God (New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award), Greater Clements, Lewiston/Clarkston and Grangeville, among others. His film adaptation of The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Brendan Fraser, earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the film received two Oscars as well. On television, Hunter was a writer and producer on all four seasons of FX’s Baskets. Hunter is a MacArthur Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, and his plays have been produced off-Broadway, regionally and internationally. A native of Moscow, Idaho, he holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and Juilliard.