Maestro of the human drama, playwright Samuel D. Hunter isn't afraid to peer into the future

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Set us as preferred Samuel D.Hunter writes compact human dramas that pack a maximal punch.

Both “Grangeville,” Los Angeles’ most acclaimed theatrical offering of the summer (extended at Ruskin Group Theatre through Sept.21), and “A Case for the Existence of God,” which opened last weekend in a Rogue Machine production at the Matrix Theater’s Henry Murray Stage, are virtuoso two-handers.Although modest in scale, no one would describe these plays as small.

Both take in the wider world as they drill down into the behavioral dynamics that constitute the dramatic core of his work.The bard of Idaho, where he was raised but no longer lives, Hunter is keenly aware that no one exists in a psychological vacuum.

Politics, economics, religion and geography shape the inner world of his characters every bit as much as childhood trauma.Sitting opposite Hunter at a luncheonette he frequents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I can’t help feeling like I’ve been cast in one of his plays.I had scribbled a few questions in advance but felt no compulsion to stick to any script, preferring that our own character dynamics might determine the plot of our interview.Drama in Hunter’s hands is built around an encounter.

He doesn’t force his characters to jump through hoops.He listens to them, as they navigate their complicated feelings, closely tracking the way their intersecting paths lead them toward incremental revelation.Hunter, who lives in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood with his husband and daughter, hails from Moscow, Idaho — the state where most of his plays are set.

He moved to New York at 18 to study playwriting at NYU, but he’s been remarkably faithful to the world he left behind.“I’ve seen extreme ends of the spectrum, from being enrolled in a fundamentalist Christian school in a small town in Idaho...