The main protagonist, a young man, has recently decided to become a lifelong missionary there, and his sister returns to town to try to stop him.

That loose plot outline, with its rural setting and examination of fundamentalism, doesn't sound unusual for a news article or a Christian movie, but it seems less likely for a script by a celebrated young playwright working in New York City.

Samuel D. Hunter said "The Harvest," a new work that will have a staged reading Thursday at the Colony playwrights' gathering, isn't a political play but a character study in keeping with his previous work, which features figures familiar from his upbringing in Moscow, Idaho.

"If there is an agenda to any of my plays, it's examining those people and those lives," Hunter said in a phone interview from Idaho. 

Hunter's plays, which in 2014 earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed a "genius grant," have mined unglamorous, everyday settings and characters: a Hobby Lobby where workers struggle to get by and some anticipate the Rapture ("A Bright New Boise"), an Olive Garden-like restaurant in a quickly growing city ("Pocatello"), the apartment of a 600-pound man who has one last chance to reconnect with his daughter ("The Whale.")

"The plays frequently dovetail off one another in terms of form and content," he said. They are in some ways a larger project about empathy, a feature that seems especially lacking as the cultural divide in America deepens.

Hunter, who is gay, pointed to "A Great Wilderness," his play about an aging gay conversion therapist who's recently been diagnosed with dementia. He takes on one final client and must finally confront the results of his life's work.

It's not a political work, he said, but a "deeply tragic" character study about a person his urban theater-going and liberal audience might otherwise quickly recoil from.

He described it as his most divisive script; audiences expect or even demand a polemic against the character.

There's a point partway through the play when the audience realizes it's not a political work, and they're forced to take one of two routes, he said. They can label the play regressive and wait out the second half, or they can follow along and enter the character's world, "which is perhaps the harder fork to take."

"For my own part, I just have to continually get better at my craft so I can allow people to take the turn toward empathy," he said. "I guess that's my project as a writer, play by play, figuring out how to let people take that turn."

***

Hunter, now in his mid-30s, grew up in Moscow, Idaho, where his family goes back six generations. His father is an emergency room physician, originally from Troy, Idaho. Hunter attended a nondenominational evangelical school for part of high school before transferring to a public school.

He said the Christian school provided a good education. He did some acting in the theater program, but initially wrote free-verse poetry before transitioning into plays.

"It's not something I necessarily arrived at through theater, ironically," he said.

Outside of school, he said the community provided outlets for his interest in theater.

"Missoula feels like a bigger version of Moscow in a lot of ways," he said, describing it as a mountain town whose college provided "a window into the larger culture."

When he was 16 he saw Tony Kushner's era-defining "Angels in America," a sweeping chronicle of the AIDS epidemic during Reagan-era America, at the University of Idaho, and he interned at the Idaho Repertory Theatre.

Hunter earned his BFA in playwriting at New York University, where he applied specifically because of the playwriting program.

He said he and everyone else had a "probably healthy skepticism" about his chosen major. For a long time, he assumed he would earn his master's and then hopefully find a faculty job somewhere.

After his plays began getting produced, he said it took awhile "before I even trusted that, if that makes sense. I think it was a surprise to a lot of people, probably most of all, me," he said.

After NYU, he studied for his MFA at the University of Iowa and attended the Juilliard Playwrights Program.

When he was younger, he was pulled more toward experimental theater and the downtown scene, which he still admires. It took him a long time to admit to himself that he was better at character studies than formal experimentation.

"I had to be really honest with myself about who I wanted to write about," he said.

Regarding his chosen subject matter, he never connected to the "affluent East Coast stories" that are common in the New York theater world.

"Even though I spent my entire adult life in New York, I still identify with Idaho in a really big way, and I maintain that identification through my writing," he said. (He typically returns home once or twice a year.)

He said he's lucky to have found support for these types of stories, but premiering plays about rural America for audiences in New York has its own nuances.

They might have "this inherent idea about who those people are and it's very 'other.' There's the flyover states, and I think that Idaho's even farther out than a fly-over state. That's a state that you don't even fly over," he said.

"I think they approach the play with this sort of distance: like you're analyzing it from afar, and over the years I began to play with that interaction and even capitalize on that distance," he said.

For instance, "The Harvest" begins in a church basement, where the evangelical missionaries in training speak in tongues for 10 minutes.

He said he's deliberately trying to make the audience feel initially alienated from the characters. If he's succeeded, then they will have bridged a farther divide by the end.

"I think that journey from distance to empathy can be a little more profound than if you identify with them in the beginning," he said.

Hunter has experienced criticism that he's looking down on his characters, a complaint often leveled against Alexander Payne, the writer, director and Nebraska resident whose work chronicles and satirizes middle America.

"I've gotten that response so frequently I've just come to expect it," Hunter said. He thinks some audience members expect "one of those 'noble tales of the working class' kind of plays, and when they don't get it they think that I'm being hypercritical or cutting them down, whereas I think that if I wrote a play about New Yorkers, I would write about just as flawed people as I write about in Idaho.

"My experience of the world is that everyone is flawed and that everyone is complicated and I think I just try to reflect that in my writing," he said.

***

In 2014, he was selected for a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, which picks individuals from fields as varied as the arts, science and academia. The grant comes with $625,000 delivered over five years, which can be spent on projects of the recipients' choosing.

Hunter had returned to New York from rehearsals in Chicago, and was working at his apartment when he received the phone call.

"My first thought was, 'Is there something else called the MacArthur' ?" he said.

He said he initially considered using the money to change course or "trying something really outrageous and ambitious." After further thought, he decided that he should continue pursuing the direction that had earned him the award in the first place.

It has, however, freed him to "say yes to a project that's going to make me $500" without worrying about his finances.