The play opens with a thirtysomething man, Kyle Carter (Jonah Von Spreecken), whose body is duct-taped to a La-Z-Boy chair. He can't speak because his mouth is also duct-taped. The way the man is dressed, in a baseball cap and hunting vest, says one thing: working-class hick. This is the living room of his mass-produced home in the rural South, and soon his thirtysomething wife, Nan Carter (Sara Coates), will enter the scene and explain to the audience why Kyle is duct-taped to his La-Z-Boy.

To be a little more accurate, Nan doesn't directly explain the situation herself. Instead, she has Trisha (Hannah Mootz), a stripper and aspiring actress who she recently met at the local mall (and who wants to go to LA and become somebody), help her. This is what we learn: Nan's husband loves to hunt and is in the habit of beating his wife whenever she disobeys him or challenges his authority. His wife hates his hunting, which he does without a license, and his violent oppression of her. After the final straw (he hits her for some trivial reason), she decides to confine him to the chair, transform the living room into a courtroom, try him for the crimes he committed during the course of their unhappy marriage, pass judgment, and execute punishment: death by bear.

This is a comedy.

The husband is given two or three opportunities to defend himself. But whenever the duct tape is ripped off his mouth, it's soon put back on because he really has nothing new to say. He is exactly what his wife says he is: a fucking negative creep who drinks too much and clings to his guns. Kyle, who symbolizes all that is wrong with the South, also has a very low opinion of women in general. (On one occasion, he tried to get a blowjob from the stripper for an embarrassingly small fee—this revelation hardly surprises his wife.) He is also homophobic.

Four things make this play worth the time and effort. Von Spreecken's Kyle feels real: the drawl, the body language, and, now that Nan has made him powerless, the genuine fear for his life. Coates does an even better Nan: her nervous moments, her moments of doubt, her ridiculous bravery, her real anger. The solid direction by Keri Healey never loses sight of the seriousness of the play, written by Lauren Gunderson, until its final moments. (Healey is also a playwright and the author of Torso, a recent local hit that deals with murder in the family as well, but in a considerably darker way.)

The fourth thing about Exit, Pursued by a Bear concerns the 39th president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. He is Nan's savior. She lives by his words in the way Christians live by the words of the New Testament. But as the words of Jesus weirdly reinforce Southern social conservatism, promote gun ownership, and justify the destruction of nature and wild animals, the words of Carter strengthen Nan's feminism and resolve to overthrow the patriarchal order that has crushed and ruined a good part of her life.

True, it's hard not to laugh when Nan quotes Jimmy Carter in this or that tense moment, but as the play progresses, you begin to wonder why you were laughing in the first place. Why did you find it funny that a powerless, poor woman would find meaning in Carter's humanism?

Right around the middle of the play, the speech Carter delivered on July 15, 1979, to millions of Americans is projected on the living room curtains. This is his "crisis of the spirit in our country" speech: "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self- indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns."

What's sad (and as a consequence funny) is how this complete honesty sounds totally ridiculous to us now. This is not what a president is to supposed to sound like: He is supposed to lie to us, to tell us our nation is great, and to make promises he will never fulfill. If Nan is a fool for seeing the greatness of Carter and taking solace in his example, then the world needs more fools.