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In many ways, the main conflict in the play grew directly out of my interactions with freshmen at Rutgers. Though the story of The Whale is fundamentally a story of a father trying to reconnect with a daughter, he's doing so by trying to teach her how to write a good essay. But in teaching her how to write a good essay, he’s trying to teach her how to think independently and how to relate to other people. Ultimately, he’s teaching her how to have empathy. – Samuel D. Hunter, Playwright’s Perspective, July 2012
Just as Melville coaxes layers upon layers of meaning out of the symbology of Moby Dick, Sam gets a lot of mileage out of the many intentional resonances of his play with Melville. The great white whale does not mean just one thing. To Ahab it may represent the darkness of his own soul, but in the worldview of the novel, it also represents death or the hidden soul... In this way, The Whale is not just a family drama about a morbidly obese man's final days, any more than Moby Dick is just a chronicle of a whaling ship. – Tim Sanford, “From the Artistic Director” July 2012
Adam Greenfield: Seems like there’s a kind of instinct or compulsion, maybe, to expose another side to what we see, to the veneer. To expose the underbelly.
Samuel D. Hunter: I think in the beginning that maybe there was. But I think it’s evolved away from “expose the underbelly,” evolved into wanting to shed some light upon a corner we don’t normally see. And without judgment, hopefully. I don’t think my early plays actually had a lot of judgment in them but I think they did feel much more like, “Oh, look at this!” you know, like ,”Bet you didn’t expect that!” But I think it’s evolved hopefully into something where I’m not there pulling the strings. – Adam Greenfield and Samuel D. Hunter, Interview from October, 2012
For anyone, of course, the thought of home carries with it a confusing mash-up of emotions and issues, chronically unresolved, where the claustrophobia and disorientation of being a teenager is complicated by the remembrance of home-cooked meals, bicycles, and hanging out. It's not surprising that Hunter, like so many writers, returns to the landscape of his youth: the soil there is fertile. When considering his plays collectively, Sam's Idaho is riddled with paradoxes, as majestic as it is oppressive, as desolate as it is unexpectedly beautiful. – Adam Greenfield, The American Voice: Your Own Private Idaho, July 2012
Since its inception in the 1820s, Mormonism has provoked complex feelings—a mixture of admiration, incredulity, suspicion and revulsion, that has inspired, above all else, a persistent curiosity. There's a lot about Mormonism that speaks to the American character, to our sense of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. – Alec Strum, “Backstory: The Mormon Moment” July 2012
