Two middle-aged half brothers try to connect in Samuel D. Hunter's new drama.

The first moments of Samuel D. Hunter's new play, "Grangeville," now at the Signature, take place in the pitch dark. Out of the blackness, a man's voice—nasal, strongly Midwestern, a little plaintive—asks what seems like a silly question: "Is it late over there?" He doesn't really get an answer. The pause crackles; we hear the glottal static of an international phone call. The response, when it finally comes, is clipped. "This bill isn't itemized," a different voice says.

After some time, pale light dawns on the two men talking: Jerry (Paul Sparks) and Arnold (Brian J. Smith), estranged middle-aged half brothers from tiny Grangeville, Idaho. Jerry, a down-home, aw-shucks guy, has never left Grangeville, and now, with his marriage falling apart, he's returned to the trailer where he and his younger brother grew up in near-total abandonment. Their mother is dying, and, as various paperwork issues pile up, Jerry keeps calling, trying to reconnect with Arnold, who decades earlier fled neglect and homophobic violence for a life in the Netherlands with a kind Dutch husband, a serious art career—and an emotionally stultifying hatred for his family.

The actors, speaking to each other across a dark limbo, don't hold cell phones or, when they shift to video calls, laptops. (The sound designer, Christopher Darbassie, subtly warps their voices so that we feel the thousands of miles between them.) The black, low-ceilinged letterbox set is by the collective called dots, and, for a long time, the only realistic touch is a ragged trailer door. Sparks stays near that door, as if Jerry's been tethered to it.